SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 21 — A funny thing happened while Halsey Minor was trying to kill print journalism. He ended up publishing magazines — big, heavy magazines, with beautiful pictures on quality paper — the kind he and others had declared obsolete.

The founder of the technology news site CNet.com readily admits to an about-face. “I spent my time at CNet talking about how print was going to be challenged by the Internet and specifically how we were going to make magazines go away,” he said. “But two years ago I realized I was still reading over 100 magazines a month. I like holding them and turning the pages. And the images are better than on the Internet.”

Amid the YouTube-fueled craze for user-generated content, he wondered why readers, instead of writers and editors whom he would have to pay, could not do most of the heavy lifting. He also pondered how he might get rid of, or at least reduce, the large ad sales staff. He just was not sure how to pull it off.

Then in 2006 he met Paul Cloutier and Derek Powazek, Web-publishing veterans who were publishing a user-generated on-demand photo magazine called JPG. One issue took e-mail submissions and used a self-publishing service to sell downloads or print copies with the founders’ favorites.

They wanted to expand. Mr. Minor, who has backed a number of successful ventures since CNet — including Salesforce.com, which went public, and Grand Central, which was sold to Google — had money to invest. A few weeks later, in June, 8020 Publishing was born. It was named after the proverbial ratio of passive Web users (sometimes called lurkers) to those who actually write and contribute. Mr. Minor wants to build the company into an empire of Web-generated print magazines.

“Dan Rather was a pivotal moment for me,” he said, referring to the way bloggers discovered inconsistencies in the anchorman’s 2004 “60 Minutes” story about President Bush’s military service. “You can be an ‘expert,’ but the collective way is so much richer and deeper that it’s almost impossible to compete with.”

He is hardly the only one with the idea of using user-generated content to make money. Many Web sites, like YouTube or Yelp, thrive on content that users donate. The Al Gore venture CurrentTV is a cable channel devoted to videos submitted by the general public. Google recently filed a patent for user-generated content publications.

But 8020 is different because Mr. Minor thinks he can also make money from old-fashioned print.

Online readers vote on their favorite submissions appearing at JPGmag.com. Then a tiny staff of 10 designs a layout for the winners and about 50,000 high-quality slick-looking magazines are printed six times a year. They are sold through $25 annual subscriptions and on newsstands for $6 each.

The online version is free. Readers can also download and print a PDF file of the entire magazine free, because the publishers assume that physically holding a high-quality magazine is more satisfying than viewing it online and therefore will not cannibalize newsstand sales.

Even with that freebie, Mr. Minor says that 70 percent of his magazines on newsstands are purchased, a surprisingly high “sell-through” rate; most magazine publishers would be thrilled with 50 percent.

The start-up was not without turmoil. Mr. Powazek (along with his wife, Heather Powazek Champ, also at the magazine since its founding) left 8020 in May, saying that a power-hungry Mr. Cloutier had pushed him out. On his blog, Powazek.com, he accused Mr. Cloutier and Mr. Minor of minimizing his contributions to the new and old versions of JPG. He was particularly upset that the earliest issues had been taken off the site.

Mr. Powazek said he did not realize his influence would be diminished so severely when he agreed that Mr. Cloutier should run 8020. He also laid claim to the idea for 8020, pointing out that he and his wife put together the first e-mail-driven version of JPG without Mr. Cloutier.

While he no longer has a role at 8020, Mr. Powazek still owns a small percentage of JPG. Mr. Cloutier does not dispute that the partnership ended badly or that the first issues were taken off the Web site. But he said it was necessary to distinguish between the incarnations of the magazine, since the new one was so different. And he said Mr. Powazek obstructed the introduction of the new company and magazine and alienated the staff members by refusing to let newcomers contribute to what he saw as his baby.

Nevertheless, Mr. Minor and company are so happy with the business model that they have produced a second user-generated magazine called Everywhere, devoted to travel. It went on sale last week.

“You’re going to see more of this,” said Samir Husni, who is chairman of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi and writes the well-known magazine business blog Mrmagazine.com. “I don’t think it’s just about getting cheap content into a magazine. Seeing their own work in print makes people feel like part of a community.”

Community is a mantra Mr. Minor and Mr. Cloutier, now chief executive of 8020, repeat often. The JPG and Everywhere sites have lots of what the staff calls “easy jumping-in points” — features meant to get users involved without intimidating them.

“Ask someone to write a magazine story and they freeze up,” said Mr. Cloutier, who has designed magazine Web sites and helped start CurrentTV. “But say ‘send us a postcard’ and it becomes easy.”

Users can submit photos, writing and travel recommendations to Everywhere and comment on everything. If a comment is popular enough, it might end up in print under someone else’s photo.

8020 tries to make the magazine more readable by limiting advertising. Web ads are subtle — no pop-ups. The dozen or so advertisers in the print issues are limited to the first few pages, the back, and sponsorships of special sections. Adobe Systems, Sony, Epson, Audi and Virgin America have bought ads. 8020 can afford to limit advertising because, Mr. Minor said, it does not need it to make a profit from them. It says it makes money on each subscription and newsstand sale — the opposite of the traditional magazine business.

And while JPG’s circulation is only 18,000 subscriptions, the company said it needed to sell just 30,000 to break even on each issue. The small print runs and low overhead leave money for quality paper, an increasing rarity among magazines. It is also reflected in the content. Data, like hotel phone numbers and addresses, is likely to be on the Web but not in a print version of Everywhere. Longer stories and photo essays might be featured solely in print.

Now they will see whether users share their vision. In the meantime, Mr. Minor and the 8020 staff are kicking around ideas for the next magazine. Mr. Minor said he was in the venture for the long haul. “I would be really upset if it didn’t work because it should work,” he said. “We should be able to build a large media company based on people publishing for themselves.”

ROSIE PEREZ prides herself on her waitressing skills and her ability to make a perfect mojito, but on a trek to Socialista, the West Village restaurant and lounge, she was content to have someone else serve her. Ms. Perez — the choreographer turned actress turned documentary filmmaker — was fresh from a performance of “The Ritz,” a revival of the Terrence McNally comedy in which she stars as a bathhouse chanteuse. “The Ritz” is one of the few Broadway shows unaffected by the stagehands’ strike.

She had removed the eyeliner and glitter remaining from what she said had been a dozen wardrobe changes, five wigs and four makeup styles, and had transformed into a downtown knockout, replete with gold hoop earrings, a low-cut V-neck black cocktail dress and boots with three-inch heels. Ms. Perez was seated at a corner table, where what appears to be a basement speakeasy gives way to a Cuban oasis with bright blue walls, dim lights and a dusty pair of boxing gloves hanging in one corner.

“I love this place,” Ms. Perez said. “But it’s so politically incorrect. There’s a big fat picture of Fidel.” Eyeing the boxing gloves, she professed a love of the sport and rattled off a detailed list of her favorite bantam- and welterweights.

Ms. Perez’s mojito hadn’t touched her lips when five of her “Ritz” cast mates, a dresser for the show and some friends arrived, forcing a move to a back table beneath a stylized beige palm.

“It’s amazing how this cast has become its own universe,” said Ashlie Atkinson, an actor from “The Ritz.”

If the evening had a recurring theme, it was wonderment at the close offstage family they’ve created, a camaraderie pierced only when a nosy reporter asked Ms. Perez her age. “It’s rude to ask a lady her age or her weight,” she quickly replied.

In Spanish, Ms. Perez ordered appetizers for her entourage: pechuga y piernita (a chicken dish so good it was ordered twice), tostones (fried plantains), duck leg empanadas, bocadillos (pork sandwiches) and giant prawns. Ms. Perez sipped her mojito and pronounced it perfect. A few swallows later, she added water to her drink, commencing a cycle of sipping and distilling that would horrify a bartender. “I’m not a drinker,” Ms. Perez explained.

As plates were passed around, Ms. Perez told her cast mates Kevin Carolan, 39, and Ms. Atkinson, 30, about her college days in California working at Sizzler, the chain restaurant. She described herself as “bossy, but kind” and well liked by her customers. “I got fired because the manager wanted to go out with me and he couldn’t go out with employees,” Ms. Perez said.

So, her listeners wondered, what did she do?

“I went out with him,” Ms. Perez said. She flashed a wicked smile.

After a trip upstairs to the lounge, where Ms. Perez bumped into the director Brett Ratner, a friend since the 1980s, she hugged her cast mates good night. It was half past 1 in the morning, and she wanted to go home to her boyfriend and her dogs, Sammy Samowitz and Rainy Raindrops. “You’ve got to rest your body or you cheat the audience,” Ms. Perez said. With a grin, she was gone.

I. Faculty Development

On a blustery fall New England day in 2001, a friendly representative from Wyeth Pharmaceuticals came into my office in Newburyport, Mass., and made me an offer I found hard to refuse. He asked me if I’d like to give talks to other doctors about using Effexor XR for treating depression. He told me that I would go around to doctors’ offices during lunchtime and talk about some of the features of Effexor. It would be pretty easy. Wyeth would provide a set of slides and even pay for me to attend a speaker’s training session, and he quickly floated some numbers. I would be paid $500 for one-hour “Lunch and Learn” talks at local doctors’ offices, or $750 if I had to drive an hour. I would be flown to New York for a “faculty-development program,” where I would be pampered in a Midtown hotel for two nights and would be paid an additional “honorarium.”

I thought about his proposition. I had a busy private practice in psychiatry, specializing in psychopharmacology. I was quite familiar with Effexor, since I had read recent studies showing that it might be slightly more effective than S.S.R.I.’s, the most commonly prescribed antidepressants: the Prozacs, Paxils and Zolofts of the world. S.S.R.I. stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, referring to the fact that these drugs increase levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin, a chemical in the brain involved in regulating moods. Effexor, on the other hand, was being marketed as a dual reuptake inhibitor, meaning that it increases both serotonin and norepinephrine, another neurotransmitter. The theory promoted by Wyeth was that two neurotransmitters are better than one, and that Effexor was more powerful and effective than S.S.R.I.’s.

I had already prescribed Effexor to several patients, and it seemed to work as well as the S.S.R.I.’s. If I gave talks to primary-care doctors about Effexor, I reasoned, I would be doing nothing unethical. It was a perfectly effective treatment option, with some data to suggest advantages over its competitors. The Wyeth rep was simply suggesting that I discuss some of the data with other doctors. Sure, Wyeth would benefit, but so would other doctors, who would become more educated about a good medication.

A few weeks later, my wife and I walked through the luxurious lobby of the Millennium Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. At the reception desk, when I gave my name, the attendant keyed it into the computer and said, with a dazzling smile: “Hello, Dr. Carlat, I see that you are with the Wyeth conference. Here are your materials.”

She handed me a folder containing the schedule of talks, an invitation to various dinners and receptions and two tickets to a Broadway musical. “Enjoy your stay, doctor.” I had no doubt that I would, though I felt a gnawing at the edge of my conscience. This seemed like a lot of money to lavish on me just so that I could provide some education to primary-care doctors in a small town north of Boston.

The next morning, the conference began. There were a hundred or so other psychiatrists from different parts of the U.S. I recognized a couple of the attendees, including an acquaintance I hadn’t seen in a while. I’d heard that he moved to another state and was making a bundle of money, but nobody seemed to know exactly how.

I joined him at his table and asked him what he had been up to. He said he had a busy private practice and had given a lot of talks for Warner-Lambert, a company that had since been acquired by Pfizer. His talks were on Neurontin, a drug that was approved for epilepsy but that my friend had found helpful for bipolar disorder in his practice. (In 2004, Warner-Lambert pleaded guilty to illegally marketing Neurontin for unapproved uses. It is illegal for companies to pay doctors to promote so-called off-label uses.)

I knew about Neurontin and had prescribed it occasionally for bipolar disorder in my practice, though I had never found it very helpful. A recent study found that it worked no better than a placebo for this condition. I asked him if he really thought Neurontin worked for bipolar, and he said that he felt it was “great for some patients” and that he used it “all the time.” Given my clinical experiences with the drug, I wondered whether his positive opinion had been influenced by the money he was paid to give talks.

But I put those questions aside as we gulped down our coffees and took seats in a large lecture room. On the agenda were talks from some of the most esteemed academics in the field, authors of hundreds of articles in the major psychiatric journals. They included Michael Thase, of the University of Pittsburgh and the researcher who single-handedly put Effexor on the map with a meta-analysis, and Norman Sussman, a professor of psychiatry at New York University, who was master of ceremonies.

Thase strode to the lectern first in order to describe his groundbreaking work synthesizing data from more than 2,000 patients who had been enrolled in studies comparing Effexor with S.S.R.I.’s. At this time, with his Effexor study a topic of conversation in the mental-health world, Thase was one of the most well known and well respected psychiatrists in the United States. He cut a captivating figure onstage: tall and slim, dynamic, incredibly articulate and a master of the research craft.

He began by reviewing the results of the meta-analysis that had the psychiatric world abuzz. After carefully pooling and processing data from eight separate clinical trials, Thase published a truly significant finding: Effexor caused a 45 percent remission rate in patients in contrast to the S.S.R.I. rate of 35 percent and the placebo rate of 25 percent. It was the first time one antidepressant was shown to be more effective than any other. Previously, psychiatrists chose antidepressants based on a combination of guesswork, gut feeling and tailoring a drug’s side effects to a patient’s symptom profile. If Effexor was truly more effective than S.S.R.I.’s, it would amount to a revolution in psychiatric practice and a potential windfall for Wyeth.

One impressive aspect of Thase’s presentation was that he was not content to rest on his laurels; rather he raised a series of potential criticisms of his results and then rebutted them convincingly. For example, skeptics had pointed out that Thase was a paid consultant to Wyeth and that both of his co-authors were employees of the company. Thase responded that he had requested and had received all of the company’s data and had not cherry-picked from those studies most favorable for Effexor. This was a significant point, because companies sometimes withhold negative data from publication in medical journals. For example, in 2004, GlaxoSmithKline was sued by Eliot Spitzer, who was then the New York attorney general, for suppressing data hinting that Paxil causes suicidal thoughts in children. The company settled the case and agreed to make clinical-trial results public.

Another objection was that while the study was billed as comparing Effexor with S.S.R.I.’s in general, in fact most of the data compared Effexor with one specific S.S.R.I.: Prozac. Perhaps Effexor was, indeed, more effective than Prozac; this did not necessarily mean that it was more effective than the other S.S.R.I.’s in common use. But Thase announced that since the original study, he had analyzed data on Paxil and other meds and also found differences in remission rates.

For his study, Thase chose what was at that time an unusual measure of antidepressant improvement: “remission,” rather than the more standard measure, “response.” In clinical antidepressant trials, a “response” is defined as a 50 percent improvement in depressive symptoms, as measured by the Hamilton depression scale. Thus, if a patient enters a study scoring a 24 on the Hamilton (which would be a moderate degree of depression), he or she would have “responded” if the final score, after treatment, was 12 or less.

Remission, on the other hand, is defined as “complete” recovery. While you might think that a patient would have to score a 0 on the Hamilton to be in remission, in fact very few people score that low, no matter how deliriously happy they are. Instead, researchers come up with various cutoff scores for remission. Thase chose a cutoff score of 7 or below.

In his study, he emphasized the remission rates and not the response rates. As I listened to his presentation, I wondered why. Was it because he felt that remission was the only really meaningful outcome by which to compare drugs? Or was it because using remission made Effexor look more impressive than response did? Thase indirectly addressed this issue in his paper by pointing out that even when remission was defined in different ways, with different cutoff points, Effexor beat the S.S.R.I.’s every time. That struck me as a pretty convincing endorsement of Wyeth’s antidepressant.

The next speaker, Norm Sussman, took the baton from Thase and explored the concept of remission in more detail. Sussman’s job was to systematically go through the officially sanctioned “slide deck” — slides provided to us by Wyeth, which we were expected to use during our own presentations.

If Thase was the riveting academic, Sussman was the engaging populist, translating some of the drier research concepts into terms that our primary-care-physician audiences would understand. Sussman exhorted us not to be satisfied with response and encouraged us to set the bar higher. “Is the patient doing everything they were doing before they got depressed?” he asked. “Are they doing it even better? That’s remission.” To further persuade us, he highlighted a slide showing that patients who made it all the way to remission are less likely to relapse to another depressive episode than patients who merely responded. And for all its methodological limitations, it was a slide that I would become well acquainted with, as I would use it over and over again in my own talks.

When it came to side effects, Effexor’s greatest liability was that it could cause hypertension, a side effect not shared by S.S.R.I.’s. Sussman showed us some data from the clinical trials, indicating that at lower doses, about 3 percent of patients taking Effexor had hypertension as compared with about 2 percent of patients assigned to a placebo. There was only a 1 percent difference between Effexor and placebo, he commented, and pointed out that treating high blood pressure might be a small price to pay for relief from depression.

It was an accurate reading of the data, and I remember finding it a convincing defense of Effexor’s safety. As I look back at my notes now, however, I notice that another way of describing the same numbers would have been to say that Effexor leads to a 50 percent greater rate of hypertension than a placebo. Framed this way, Effexor looks more hazardous.

And so it went for the rest of the afternoon.

Was I swallowing the message whole? Certainly not. I knew that this was hardly impartial medical education, and that we were being fed a marketing line. But when you are treated like the anointed, wined and dined in Manhattan and placed among the leaders of the field, you inevitably put some of your critical faculties on hold. I was truly impressed with Effexor’s remission numbers, and like any physician, I was hopeful that something new and different had been introduced to my quiver of therapeutic options.

At the end of the last lecture, we were all handed envelopes as we left the conference room. Inside were checks for $750. It was time to enjoy ourselves in the city.

II. The Art and Science of Detailing

Pharmaceutical “detailing” is the term used to describe those sales visits in which drug reps go to doctors’ offices to describe the benefits of a specific drug. Once I returned to my Newburyport office from New York, a couple of voice-mail messages from local Wyeth reps were already waiting for me, inviting me to give some presentations at local doctors’ offices. I was about to begin my speaking — and detailing — career in earnest.

How many doctors speak for drug companies? We don’t know for sure, but one recent study indicates that at least 25 percent of all doctors in the United States receive drug money for lecturing to physicians or for helping to market drugs in other ways. This meant that I was about to join some 200,000 American physicians who are being paid by companies to promote their drugs. I felt quite flattered to have been recruited, and I assumed that the rep had picked me because of some special personal or professional quality.

The first talk I gave brought me back to earth rather quickly. I distinctly remember the awkwardness of walking into my first waiting room. The receptionist slid the glass partition open and asked if I had an appointment.

“Actually, I’m here to meet with the doctor.”

“Oh, O.K. And is that a scheduled appointment?”

“I’m here to give a talk.”

A light went on. “Oh, are you part of the drug lunch?”

Regardless of how I preferred to think of myself (an educator, a psychiatrist, a consultant), I was now classified as one facet of a lunch helping to pitch a drug, a convincing sidekick to help the sales rep. Eventually, with an internal wince, I began to introduce myself as “Dr. Carlat, here for the Wyeth lunch.”

The drug rep who arranged the lunch was always there, usually an attractive, vivacious woman with platters of gourmet sandwiches in tow. Hungry doctors and their staff of nurses and receptionists would filter into the lunch room, grateful for free food.

Once there was a critical mass (and crucially, once the M.D.‘s arrived), I was given the go-ahead by the Wyeth reps to start. I dove into my talk, going through a handout that I created, based on the official slide deck. I discussed the importance of remission, the basics of the Thase study showing the advantage of Effexor, how to dose the drug, the side effects, and I added a quick review of the other common antidepressants.

While I still had some doubts, I continued to be impressed by the 10 percent advantage in remission rates that Effexor held over S.S.R.I.’s; that advantage seemed significant enough to overcome Effexor’s more prominent side effects. Yes, I was highlighting Effexor’s selling points and playing down its disadvantages, and I knew it. But was my salesmanship going to bring harm to anybody? It seemed unlikely. The worst case was that Effexor was no more effective than anything else; it certainly was no less effective.

During my first few talks, I worried a lot about my performance. Was I too boring? Did the doctors see me as sleazy? Did the Wyeth reps find me sufficiently persuasive? But the day after my talks, I would get a call or an e-mail message from the rep saying that I did a great job, that the doctor was impressed and that they wanted to use me more. Indeed, I started receiving more and more invitations from other reps, and I soon had talks scheduled every week. I learned later that Wyeth and other companies have speaker-evaluation systems. After my talks, the reps would fill out a questionnaire rating my performance, which quickly became available to other Wyeth reps throughout the area.

As the reps became comfortable with me, they began to see me more as a sales colleague. I received faxes before talks preparing me for particular doctors. One note informed me that the physician we’d be visiting that day was a “decile 6 doctor and is not prescribing any Effexor XR, so please tailor accordingly. There is also one more doc in the practice that we are not familiar with.” The term “decile 6″ is drug-rep jargon for a doctor who prescribes a lot of medications. The higher the “decile” (in a range from 1 to 10), the higher the prescription volume, and the more potentially lucrative that doctor could be for the company.

A note from another rep reminded me of a scene from “Mission: Impossible.” “Dr. Carlat: Our main target, Dr. , is an internist. He spreads his usage among three antidepressants, Celexa, Zoloft and Paxil, at about 25-30 percent each. He is currently using about 6 percent Effexor XR. Our access is very challenging with lunches six months out.” This doctor’s schedule of lunches was filled with reps from other companies; it would be vital to make our sales visit count.+

Naïve as I was, I found myself astonished at the level of detail that drug companies were able to acquire about doctors’ prescribing habits. I asked my reps about it; they told me that they received printouts tracking local doctors’ prescriptions every week. The process is called “prescription data-mining,” in which specialized pharmacy-information companies (like IMS Health and Verispan) buy prescription data from local pharmacies, repackage it, then sell it to pharmaceutical companies. This information is then passed on to the drug reps, who use it to tailor their drug-detailing strategies. This may include deciding which physicians to aim for, as my Wyeth reps did, but it can help sales in other ways. For example, Shahram Ahari, a former drug rep for Eli Lilly (the maker of Prozac) who is now a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco’s School of Pharmacy, said in an article in The Washington Post that as a drug rep he would use this data to find out which doctors were prescribing Prozac’s competitors, like Effexor. Then he would play up specific features of Prozac that contrasted favorably with the other drug, like the ease with which patients can get off Prozac, as compared with the hard time they can have withdrawing from Effexor.

The American Medical Association is also a key player in prescription data-mining. Pharmacies typically will not release doctors’ names to the data-mining companies, but they will release their Drug Enforcement Agency numbers. The A.M.A. licenses its file of U.S. physicians, allowing the data-mining companies to match up D.E.A. numbers to specific physicians. The A.M.A. makes millions in information-leasing money.

Once drug companies have identified the doctors, they must woo them. In the April 2007 issue of the journal PLoS Medicine, Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman of Georgetown teamed up with Ahari (the former drug rep) to describe the myriad techniques drug reps use to establish relationships with physicians, including inviting them to a speaker’s meeting. These can serve to cement a positive a relationship between the rep and the doctor. This relationship is crucial, they say, since “drug reps increase drug sales by influencing physicians, and they do so with finely titrated doses of friendship.”

III. Uncomfortable Moments

I gave many talks over the ensuing several months, and I gradually became more comfortable with the process. Each setting was somewhat different. Sometimes I spoke to a crowded conference room with several physicians, nurses and other clinical staff. Other times, I sat at a small lunch table with only one other physician (plus the rep), having what amounted to a conversation about treating depression. My basic Effexor spiel was similar in the various settings, with the focus on remission and the Thase data.

Meanwhile, I was keeping up with new developments in the research literature related to Effexor, and not all of the news was positive. For example, as more data came out comparing Effexor with S.S.R.I.’s other than Prozac, the Effexor remission advantage became slimmer — more like 5 percent instead of the originally reported 10 percent. Statistically, this 5 percent advantage meant that only one out of 20 patients would potentially do better on Effexor than S.S.R.I.’s — much less compelling than the earlier proportion of one out of 10.

I also became aware of other critiques of the original Thase meta-analysis. For example, some patients enrolled in the original Effexor studies took S.S.R.I.’s in the past and presumably had not responded well. This meant that the study population may have been enriched with patients who were treatment-resistant to S.S.R.I.’s, giving Effexor an inherent advantage.

I didn’t mention any of this in my talks, partly because none of it had been included in official company slides, and partly because I was concerned that the reps wouldn’t invite me to give talks if I divulged any negative information. But I was beginning to struggle with the ethics of my silence.

One of my most uncomfortable moments came when I gave a presentation to a large group of psychiatrists. I was in the midst of wrapping up my talk with some information about Effexor and blood pressure. Referring to a large study paid for by Wyeth, I reported that patients are liable to develop hypertension only if they are taking Effexor at doses higher than 300 milligrams per day.

“Really?” one psychiatrist in the room said. “I’ve seen hypertension at lower doses in my patients.”

“I suppose it can happen, but it’s rare at doses that are commonly used for depression.”

He looked at me, frowned and shook his head. “That hasn’t been my experience.”

I reached into my folder where I kept some of the key Effexor studies in case such questions arose.

According to this study of 3,744 patients, the rate of high blood pressure was 2.2 percent in the placebo group, and 2.9 percent in the group of patients who had taken daily doses of Effexor no larger than 300 milligrams. Patients taking more than 300 milligrams had a 9 percent risk of hypertension. As I went through the numbers with the doctor, however, I felt unsettled. I started talking faster, a sure sign of nervousness for me.

Driving home, I went back over the talk in my mind. I knew I had not lied — I had reported the data exactly as they were reported in the paper. But still, I had spun the results of the study in the most positive way possible, and I had not talked about the limitations of the data. I had not, for example, mentioned that if you focused specifically on patients taking between 200 and 300 milligrams per day, a commonly prescribed dosage range, you found a 3.7 percent incidence of hypertension. While this was not a statistically significant higher rate than the placebo, it still hinted that such moderate doses could, indeed, cause hypertension. Nor had I mentioned the fact that since the data were derived from placebo-controlled clinical trials, the patients were probably not representative of the patients seen in most real practices. Patients who are very old or who have significant medical problems are excluded from such studies. But real-world patients may well be at higher risk to develop hypertension on Effexor. +

I realized that in my canned talks, I was blithely minimizing the hypertension risks, conveniently overlooking the fact that hypertension is a dangerous condition and not one to be trifled with. Why, I began to wonder, would anyone prescribe an antidepressant that could cause hypertension when there were many other alternatives? And why wasn’t I asking this obvious question out loud during my talks?

I felt rattled. That psychiatrist’s frown stayed with me — a mixture of skepticism and contempt. I wondered if he saw me for what I feared I had become — a drug rep with an M.D. I began to think that the money was affecting my critical judgement. I was willing to dance around the truth in order to make the drug reps happy. Receiving $750 checks for chatting with some doctors during a lunch break was such easy money that it left me giddy. Like an addiction, it was very hard to give up.

There was another problem: one of Effexor’s side effects. Patients who stopped the medication were calling their doctors and reporting symptoms like severe dizziness and lightheadedness, bizarre electric-shock sensations in their heads, insomnia, sadness and tearfulness. Some patients thought they were having strokes or nervous breakdowns and were showing up in emergency rooms. Gradually, however, it became clear that these were “withdrawal” symptoms. These were particularly common problems with Effexor because it has a short half-life, a measure of the time it takes the body to metabolize half of the total amount of a drug in the bloodstream. Paxil, another short half-life antidepressant, caused similar problems.

At the Wyeth meeting in New York, these withdrawal effects were mentioned in passing, though we were assured that Effexor withdrawal symptoms were uncommon and could usually be avoided by tapering down the dose very slowly. But in my practice, that strategy often did not work, and patients were having a very hard time coming off Effexor in order to start a trial of a different antidepressant.

I wrestled with how to handle this issue in my Effexor talks, since I believed it was a significant disadvantage of the drug. Psychiatrists frequently have to switch medications because of side effects or lack of effectiveness, and anticipating this potential need to change medications plays into our initial choice of a drug. Knowing that Effexor was hard to give up made me think twice about prescribing it in the first place.

During my talks, I found myself playing both sides of the issue, making sure to mention that withdrawal symptoms could be severe but assuring doctors that they could “usually” be avoided. Was I lying? Not really, since there were no solid published data, and indeed some patients had little problem coming off Effexor. But was I tweaking and pruning the truth in order to stay positive about the product? Definitely. And how did I rationalize this? I convinced myself that I had told “most” of the truth and that the potential negative consequences of this small truth “gap” were too trivial to worry about.

As the months went on, I developed more and more reservations about recommending that Effexor be used as a “first line” drug before trying the S.S.R.I.’s. Not only were the newer comparative data less impressive, but the studies were short-term, lasting only 6 to 12 weeks. It seemed entirely possible that if the clinical trials had been longer — say, six months — S.S.R.I.’s would have caught up with Effexor. Effexor was turning out to be an antidepressant that might have a very slight effectiveness advantage over S.S.R.I.’s but that caused high blood pressure and had prolonged withdrawal symptoms.

At my next Lunch and Learn, I mentioned toward the end of my presentation that data in support of Effexor were mainly short-term, and that there was a possibility that S.S.R.I.’s were just as effective. I felt reckless, but I left the office with a restored sense of integrity.

Several days later, I was visited by the same district manager who first offered me the speaking job. Pleasant as always, he said: “My reps told me that you weren’t as enthusiastic about our product at your last talk. I told them that even Dr. Carlat can’t hit a home run every time. Have you been sick?”

At that moment, I decided my career as an industry-sponsored speaker was over. The manager’s message couldn’t be clearer: I was being paid to enthusiastically endorse their drug. Once I stopped doing that, I was of little value to them, no matter how much “medical education” I provided.

IV. Life After Drug Money

A year after starting my educational talks for drug companies (I had also given two talks for Forest Pharmaceuticals, pushing the antidepressant Lexapro), I quit. I had made about $30,000 in supplemental income from these talks, a significant addition to the $140,000 or so I made from my private practice. Now I publish a medical-education newsletter for psychiatrists that is not financed by the pharmaceutical industry and that tries to critically assess drug research and marketing claims. I still see patients, and I still prescribe Effexor. I don’t prescribe it as frequently as I used to, but I have seen many patients turn their lives around because they responded to this drug and to nothing else. +

In 2002, the drug industry’s trade group adopted voluntary guidelines limiting some of the more lavish benefits to doctors. While the guidelines still allow all-expenses-paid trips for physicians to attend meetings at fancy hotels, they no longer pay for spouses to attend the dinners or hand out tickets to musicals. In an e-mail message, a Wyeth spokesman wrote that Wyeth employees must follow that code and “our own Wyeth policies, which, in some cases, exceed” the trade group’s code.

Looking back on the year I spent speaking for Wyeth, I’ve asked myself if my work as a company speaker led me to do bad things. Did I contribute to faulty medical decision making? Did my advice lead doctors to make inappropriate drug choices, and did their patients suffer needlessly?

Maybe. I’m sure I persuaded many physicians to prescribe Effexor, potentially contributing to blood-pressure problems and withdrawal symptoms. On the other hand, it’s possible that some of those patients might have gained more relief from their depression and anxiety than they would have if they had been started on an S.S.R.I. Not likely, but possible.

I still allow drug reps to visit my office and give me their pitches. While these visits are short on useful medical information, they do allow me to keep up with trends in drug marketing. Recently, a rep from Bristol-Myers Squibb came into my office and invited me to a dinner program on the antipsychotic Abilify.

“I think it will be a great program, Dr. Carlat,” he said. “Would you like to come?” I glanced at the invitation. I recognized the name of the speaker, a prominent and widely published psychiatrist flown in from another state. The restaurant was one of the finest in town.

I was tempted. The wine, the great food, the proximity to a famous researcher — why not rejoin that inner circle of the select for an evening? But then I flashed to a memory of myself five years earlier, standing at a lectern and clearing my throat at the beginning of a drug-company presentation. I vividly remembered my sensations — the careful monitoring of what I would say, the calculations of how frank I should be.

“No,” I said, as I handed the rep back the invitation. “I don’t think I can make it. But thanks anyway.”

As a boy, Jeffrey Mark Deskovic could swim the length of a pool underwater without coming up for air. On sultry days at the Elmira state prison, where he spent most of his 16 years behind bars for a rape and murder he did not commit, Mr. Deskovic would close his eyes under a row of outdoor showers and imagine himself swimming.

For months after his release in September 2006, he had been yearning for a chance to dive in, to test his endurance, to feel that familiar sensation of pushing his body through the water, to get to the other side.

On a late-winter afternoon before giving a speech on wrongful convictions, Mr. Deskovic giggled mischievously as he stood at the edge of a hotel pool in Latham, N.Y., an Albany suburb, then leapt in abruptly, hugging his knees to produce a huge splash. In shorts and T-shirt, he sucked in some air and dived under, holding his breath. And holding it. He made his way across the pool in hurried, sideways strokes, and emerged gasping but smiling.

“Yes! Yes! I did it,” Mr. Deskovic yelled, his fists clenched above his head like a victorious boxer. “I still have it in me.”

A grown man with a full bushy beard, celebrating the simple accomplishment of an innocent youth. A tiny yet transcendent moment, one among many such moments of recaptured pleasures and newfound problems since his exoneration and release from prison last autumn.

Having walked out of the Westchester County Courthouse vindicated yet petrified of the unpredictable tomorrows ahead, Mr. Deskovic found that his first year on the outside was more turbulent than triumphant. Still trying to recover what was stolen from him, he is, at 34, a free man who has yet to feel truly free.

At least 205 men and one woman nationwide have been exonerated through DNA evidence since 1989, including 53 who, like Mr. Deskovic, were convicted of murder. In gathering information on 137 of them over the past four months — one of the most extensive such efforts to date — The New York Times found that many faced the same challenges Mr. Deskovic has confronted, like making a living, reconnecting with relatives and seeking financial recompense for his lost years.

But given Mr. Deskovic’s age at conviction (he was 17, one of about two dozen of the 206 exonerated inmates imprisoned as teenagers) and length of incarceration (about 35 percent spent more than 15 years behind bars), he has faced particular challenges.

He could be the assertive adult who articulately lobbied at the State Capitol in April to require videotaping of police interrogations. He could also be the overgrown adolescent who stamped his feet and pouted at a Grand Central Terminal kiosk in August when asked if he wanted his smoothie with yogurt or apple juice.

Having spent nearly half his life locked up, accused of brutalizing a high school classmate he hardly knew, Mr. Deskovic was sent into the world last fall lacking some of life’s most fundamental skills and experiences.

He had never lived alone, owned a car, scanned the classifieds in search of work. He had never voted, balanced a checkbook or learned to knot a tie.

He missed the senior prom, the funeral of the grandmother who helped raise him, and his best friend’s wedding.

He said he had never made love.

For six months, Mr. Deskovic got by on $137 a month in disability checks and $150 in food stamps from the federal government, carrying cans of tuna in his backpack. Now earning money through speeches and newspaper columns about wrongful conviction, Mr. Deskovic paid rent for the first time in his life in August, for a cozy attic apartment in Tarrytown that the county subsidizes because of his depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

In September, he filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the police, the medical examiner, a prison guard and the governments of two counties, alleging that detectives falsified reports and coerced his confession, and that the prison guard groped and beat him. A separate lawsuit in the Court of Claims is planned seeking payment from the state for the wrongful incarceration.

Since January, he has been enrolled at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, and he expects to earn a bachelor’s degree in behavioral sciences in two months. Since June, he has studied daily for the Law School Admissions Test in hopes of soon going to law school.

At Mercy on a $22,000 scholarship, Mr. Deskovic has read Marx, Freud and Jung but has struggled to navigate the nuances of flirtation and friendship.

“These people are half my age,” he said one morning in a campus cafeteria filled with loud young men in baseball caps and baggy jeans. “They have their own social networks and I’m not part of it. They have direction. They’re going through the normal cycle of things.”

Mr. Deskovic’s life after exoneration has been punctuated by milestones like getting a driver’s license (and a $3,000 Pontiac Grand Am with a bumper sticker proclaiming, “Failure is not an option”), and new adventures, like playing table tennis at a Greenwich Village bar with people he had met online.

There have been confounding trips to the supermarket and painful reunions with his mother, hard-won victories over his fear of speaking in public and profound disillusionment over his own inability to accept his past.

And there was a bittersweet return to the courthouse in White Plains in May for the sentencing of the man found to have committed the crime, where the victim’s mother offered Mr. Deskovic an apology: “How I would like to turn back time and return to you what was cruelly taken away.”

Of course, she can’t. No one can.

“Sometimes,” Mr. Deskovic said one morning in his dorm room, “I feel that the only difference from here to prison is that I don’t have bars on my windows.” He was kneeling on his bed and staring at the neat lawn outside. “I’m free, but I’m trapped, and no matter how much I run, I’ll never make up for the lost time.”

Scarred Life, Severed Family

Carrying a box of religious and self-help books, a garbage bag full of legal documents and a few worn-out sweaters, Mr. Deskovic went from prison to Cobleskill, a speck of a town in central New York where his mother, Linda McGarr, settled after his conviction. He calls Cobleskill “the boondocks,” adding an expletive whenever he is angry at his mother, which is often.

While he was locked up, Ms. McGarr was Mr. Deskovic’s connection to the outside world (he has never known his father). He wrote out letters longhand and sent them to her to type. She, in turn, sent money for cans of oysters at the prison commissary. When he needed to badger a lawyer, she was his voice.

But the relationship withered through the bars. Ms. McGarr, 60, said she tired of the lonely 150-mile drives to visit him. Mr. Deskovic said he resented her lack of urgency in tackling his legal appeals.

Two days after his release, Mr. Deskovic exploded: “How come you didn’t do more to help me?”

“I know you went through hell in there,” Ms. McGarr responded, “but I paid dearly, too.”

The next morning, Mr. Deskovic stuffed his possessions in plastic bags and boarded a train to Peekskill, the scene of the crime that scarred his life.

On Nov. 15, 1989, Angela Correa — a sophomore at Peekskill High, like Mr. Deskovic — slipped a “New Kids on the Block” tape into a portable cassette player and took her camera to a park near her home, snapping a picture of a dove perched on the roof as she left. Two days later, someone spotted her naked body in the woods.

The police retrieved hair and semen samples, which did not match Mr. Deskovic’s DNA; prosecutors argued that they were from earlier consensual sex. Mr. Deskovic, however, fit the description provided by a criminal profiler for the police, and raised investigators’ suspicions when he cried copiously at Ms. Correa’s funeral, though they were not close friends. (In a recent interview, Mr. Deskovic explained that he was always picked on in school and Angela was one of few students who were nice to him, once helping him with algebra.)

After repeated questioning over two months, Mr. Deskovic confessed during a seven-hour interrogation and polygraph test, telling the police he had hit Ms. Correa with a Gatorade bottle and grabbed her around the throat. In the lawsuit, Mr. Deskovic contends that detectives fed him these details, and promised that if he confessed he would not go to prison but would receive psychiatric treatment.

“I was tired, confused, scared, hungry — I wanted to get out of there,” he recalled recently. “I told the police what they wanted to hear, but I never got to go home. They lied to me.”

More than a quarter of all prisoners exonerated by DNA evidence had falsely confessed or made incriminating statements, according to the Innocence Project, the legal clinic that secured Mr. Deskovic’s release. Like many of those men, he had maintained his innocence since shortly after the confession, proclaiming at his sentencing hearing: “I didn’t do anything.”

“Maybe you’re innocent,” the judge conceded before sentencing him to 15 years to life. “But the jury has spoken.”

Back in Peekskill after his release, frosty raindrops pelting his skin, Mr. Deskovic ambled past the police station on Nelson Avenue where he was held after his arrest and up Brown Street toward Crossroads, the apartment complex where he grew up.

“I used to play kickball here, and when it snowed, I’d get a piece of cardboard and sled down this hill over there,” he said, staring at a slope between a tall brick building and a playground. “I used to have a life.”

“Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that there are people on other planets and that all of a sudden you’re dropped there, with no idea how these people live their lives, how their society works,” he blurted. “I’m this alien. I’m the man pretending he knows what the hell is going on around him when, in fact, he’s clueless.”

Growing up, Mr. Deskovic and his younger half-brother, Christopher McGarr, spent hours shooting hoops at Depew Park, swimming in a local pool or watching wrestling on television, then mimicking the moves of Hulk Hogan and Mr. T on the living-room carpet.

“I didn’t have no father growing up, so I looked up to my brother,” explained Mr. McGarr, now 30. “But when he went to prison, a part of me died.”

On the school bus, other children called his brother a rapist, a killer. So he stopped taking the bus. Eventually, he stopped going to school. Soon he followed Mr. Deskovic into the criminal justice system, racking up more than 20 arrests and several stays in jail for drugs, theft, assault and trespassing.

By the time of Mr. Deskovic’s release, the brothers had not seen each other for 12 years. They waited another six months, until Mr. Deskovic was speaking at Siena College, near Albany, where Mr. McGarr lives.

“I don’t see him,” Mr. Deskovic said as he entered the lecture hall.

“He’s right there,” his mother replied, pointing to a man on a couch.

Mr. Deskovic hesitated, pursing his lips to stop them quivering, then trudged over to his brother, who spread his arms. They hugged a long time — Mr. Deskovic in a suit and striped tie, Mr. McGarr in loose clothes and gold chains — as their mother snapped pictures and an uncle rolled video.

“It’s been so long,” Mr. McGarr said, rubbing his fists against Mr. Deskovic’s back.

But the brothers saw each other only once more, for a tense evening of bowling and pizza in April. Mr. Deskovic’s meetings with his mother have devolved into sporadic phone calls that invariably end in screams and tears.

“Too much time has passed; we have no connection,” Mr. Deskovic said. “My relatives don’t know who I am.”

Seeking Friends

In his canvas book bag, Mr. Deskovic carries a copy of a newspaper article about his exoneration, in case anyone questions why a convicted killer is walking the streets. The newspaper picture of him and his lawyers also adorns Mr. Deskovic’s new Web site and MySpace page, which until recently included a plea: “Is anyone up to showing a man who has been away for 16 years how to have a good time?”

In his loneliest moments, when he scans the few personal contacts on his cellphone and realizes he has no one with whom to share his angst, Mr. Deskovic misses the predictability of prison life, where decisions were made for him.

At Elmira, guards woke Mr. Deskovic at 5:30 a.m. and escorted him to the kitchen, where he helped prepare breakfast for 1,800 inmates. He stood outside his cell for each of four daily counts; after the last, at 10:30 p.m., what the guards call the “quiet bell” signaled bedtime.

“If I was looking for entertainment, I’d stand by the chess players in the yard until someone challenged me” for a match, Mr. Deskovic recalled. For kinship and protection, Mr. Deskovic — a former altar boy who converted to Islam during his first year in prison — sought out fellow Muslim inmates. “If it weren’t for my religion,” he said, “I would have taken my own life in prison, or I would have lost my mind.”

On the outside, life’s pace is his to establish. During the week, there are classes, college work, psychotherapy sessions, meetings with a social worker and with the lawyers handling his compensation suit, plus practicing table tennis. Most weekends, he sits alone in his apartment, scouring the Internet for phone numbers of colleges, churches and other institutions that might be interested in hiring him for a speech.

He also trawls the Web for companionship, joining a hodgepodge of groups: “Westchester/So CT Social and Active Group,” “Straight Edge NYC” and a table tennis club.

One June evening, Mr. Deskovic took the train to the Fat Cat, a cavernous basement bar in Greenwich Village, to meet the table tennis players. As a duo played Sinatra on piano and trumpet, Mr. Deskovic ordered a ginger beer and stood across the table from a 37-year-old stockbroker who runs the group.

Score: 13-10.

“I got the momentum, baby,” Mr. Deskovic said, bobbing side to side.

14-10. 15-10.

“I got the serve now!”

18-12.

“I’m going to win! I’m going to win!”

Speaking With Motivation

On a brisk March morning, Mr. Deskovic arrived at the Mercy College cafeteria ahead of the breakfast rush, wearing a suit and carrying three ties on a hanger. He approached a woman wiping counters and whispered in her ear. She grabbed the silver tie with white diamonds and knotted it around his neck.

“I’m an adult and I don’t know how to fix my ties,” Mr. Deskovic said.

He wolfed down a plate of pancakes, then called Darren Wilkins, a concert promoter he met in December and hired to manage his career as a speaker.

Weeks before, Mr. Wilkins took Mr. Deskovic shopping in Harlem, where he bought three four-button suits. For inspiration, they have listened to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “I Have a Dream” speech. For technique, they have watched videos by the motivational speaker Tony Robbins.

Together, they drafted a lecture describing the mistakes that led to Mr. Deskovic’s wrongful conviction and outlining changes to prevent others from meeting the same fate.

That March day, before speaking to the League of Women Voters at an elegant home in Bronxville, he and Mr. Wilkins, a Christian, held hands, bowed their heads and prayed.

“Public speaking is a way for me to find some meaning to what happened to me,” explained Mr. Deskovic, who has not applied for traditional jobs since his release, but has traveled across New York and four other states for speeches, including one in Texas in September.

In Bronxville, Mr. Deskovic rested his hands on a plant stand in lieu of a lectern. His voice was flat and soft. He seemed to deliberately lock eyes with each of the 16 women sipping coffee.

“If anything I’ve said here today has moved you in any way, I’d like you to join me in a movement against wrongful convictions and to get the death penalty out of New York State,” he said. “Can you make a phone call? Can you join a demonstration?”

Between speeches, Mr. Deskovic counts on donations of food, clothes and cash from people who have heard his story in the news, as well as members of local mosques and the Westchester charity New Beginnings.

He rarely eats out, but for the occasional $4 kebab. Mostly, he survives on Cheerios, tuna, canned corn and shrimp-flavored noodle soup.

On July 27, Mr. Deskovic got the keys to a one-bedroom attic apartment, in a yellow house with green shutters in Tarrytown. The living room window overlooks the Hudson River, a view much like the one he had during a short stint at nearby Sing Sing.

He trimmed his beard that day, shedding perhaps the last visible reminder of the man prison had made him.

A month later, a dean at Mercy College, Shelley Alkin, who had helped arrange Mr. Deskovic’s scholarship after his release from prison, took him shopping at Pathmark to teach him about cleaning products, what types of food he ought to be eating and how much he should expect to pay.

“And I have a plan for when I go shopping on my own,” Mr. Deskovic said proudly. “I’m saving up the empty containers so I can bring them with me and buy the same things all over again.”

If you have ever observed ants marching in and out of a nest, you might have been reminded of a highway buzzing with traffic. To Iain D. Couzin, such a comparison is a cruel insult — to the ants.

Americans spend a 3.7 billion hours a year in congested traffic. But you will never see ants stuck in gridlock.

Army ants, which Dr. Couzin has spent much time observing in Panama, are particularly good at moving in swarms. If they have to travel over a depression in the ground, they erect bridges so that they can proceed as quickly as possible.

“They build the bridges with their living bodies,” said Dr. Couzin, a mathematical biologist at Princeton University and the University of Oxford. “They build them up if they’re required, and they dissolve if they’re not being used.”

The reason may be that the ants have had a lot more time to adapt to living in big groups. “We haven’t evolved in the societies we currently live in,” Dr. Couzin said.

By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.

Deciphering those rules is a big challenge, however, because the behavior of swarms emerges unpredictably from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals.

“No matter how much you look at an individual army ant,” Dr. Couzin said, “you will never get a sense that when you put 1.5 million of them together, they form these bridges and columns. You just cannot know that.”

To get a sense of swarms, Dr. Couzin builds computer models of virtual swarms. Each model contains thousands of individual agents, which he can program to follow a few simple rules. To decide what those rules ought to be, he and his colleagues head out to jungles, deserts or oceans to observe animals in action.

Daniel Grunbaum, a mathematical biologist at the University of Washington, said his field was suddenly making leaps forward, as math and observation of nature were joined in the work of Dr. Couzin and others. “In the next 10 years there’s going to be a lot of progress.”

He said Dr. Couzin has been important in fusing the different kinds of science required to understand animal group behavior. “He’s been a real leader in bringing a lot of ideas together,” Dr. Grunbaum said. “He has a larger vision. If it works, that’ll be a big advance.”

In the case of army ants, Dr. Couzin was intrigued by their highways. Army ants returning to their nest with food travel in a dense column. This incoming lane is flanked by two lanes of outgoing traffic. A three-lane highway of army ants can stretch for as far as 150 yards from the ant nest, comprising hundreds of thousands of insects.

What Dr. Couzin wanted to know was why army ants do not move to and from their colony in a mad, disorganized scramble. To find out, he built a computer model based on some basic ant biology. Each simulated ant laid down a chemical marker that attracted other ants while the marker was still fresh. Each ant could also sweep the air with its antennas; if it made contact with another ant, it turned away and slowed down to avoid a collision.

Dr. Couzin analyzed how the ants behaved when he tweaked their behavior. If the ants turned away too quickly from oncoming insects, they lost the scent of their trail. If they did not turn fast enough, they ground to a halt and forced ants behind them to slow down. Dr. Couzin found that a narrow range of behavior allowed ants to move as a group as quickly as possible.

It turned out that these optimal ants also spontaneously formed highways. If the ants going in one direction happened to become dense, their chemical trails attracted more ants headed the same way. This feedback caused the ants to form a single packed column. The ants going the other direction turned away from the oncoming traffic and formed flanking lanes.

To test this model, Dr. Couzin and Nigel Franks, an ant expert at the University of Bristol in England, filmed a trail of army ants in Panama. Back in England, they went through the film frame by frame, analyzing the movements of 226 ants. “Everything in the ant world is happening at such a high tempo it was very difficult to see,” Dr. Couzin said.

Eventually they found that the real ants were moving in the way that Dr. Couzin had predicted would allow the entire swarm to go as fast as possible. They also found that the ants behaved differently if they were leaving the nest or heading back. When two ants encountered each other, the outgoing ant turned away further than the incoming one. As a result, the ants headed to the nest end up clustered in a central lane, while the outgoing ants form two outer lanes. Dr. Couzin has been extending his model for ants to other animals that move in giant crowds, like fish and birds. And instead of tracking individual animals himself, he has developed programs to let computers do the work.

The more Dr. Couzin studies swarm behavior, the more patterns he finds common to many different species. He is reminded of the laws of physics that govern liquids. “You look at liquid metal and at water, and you can see they’re both liquids,” he said. “They have fundamental characteristics in common. That’s what I was finding with the animal groups — there were fundamental states they could exist in.”

Just as liquid water can suddenly begin to boil, animal swarms can also change abruptly thanks to some simple rules.

Dr. Couzin has discovered some of those rules in the ways that locusts begin to form their devastating swarms. The insects typically crawl around on their own, but sometimes young locusts come together in huge bands that march across the land, devouring everything in their path. After developing wings, they rise into the air as giant clouds made of millions of insects.

“Locusts are known to be around all the time,” Dr. Couzin said. “Why does the situation suddenly get out of control, and these locusts swarm together and devastate crops?”

Dr. Couzin traveled to remote areas of Mauritania in Africa to study the behavior of locust swarms. Back at Oxford, he and his colleagues built a circular track on which locusts could walk. “We could track the motion of all these individuals five times a second for eight hours a day,” he said.

The scientists found that when the density of locusts rose beyond a threshold, the insects suddenly began to move together. Each locust always tried to align its own movements with any neighbor. When the locusts were widely spaced, however, this rule did not have much effect on them. Only when they had enough neighbors did they spontaneously form huge bands.

“We showed that you don’t need to know lots of information about individuals to predict how the group will behave,” Dr. Couzin said of the locust findings, which were published June 2006 in Science.

Understanding how animals swarm and why they do are two separate questions, however.

In some species, animals may swarm so that the entire group enjoys an evolutionary benefit. All the army ants in a colony, for example, belong to the same family. So if individuals cooperate, their shared genes associated with swarming will become more common.

But in the deserts of Utah, Dr. Couzin and his colleagues discovered that giant swarms may actually be made up of a lot of selfish individuals.

Mormon crickets will sometimes gather by the millions and crawl in bands stretching more than five miles long. Dr. Couzin and his colleagues ran experiments to find out what caused them to form bands. They found that the forces behind cricket swarms are very different from the ones that bring locusts together. When Mormon crickets cannot find enough salt and protein, they become cannibals.

“Each cricket itself is a perfectly balanced source of nutrition,” Dr. Couzin said. “So the crickets, every 17 seconds or so, try to attack other individuals. If you don’t move, you’re likely to be eaten.”

This collective movement causes the crickets to form vast swarms. “All these crickets are on a forced march,” Dr. Couzin said. “They’re trying to attack the crickets who are ahead, and they’re trying to avoid being eaten from behind.”

Swarms, regardless of the forces that bring them together, have a remarkable ability to act like a collective mind. A swarm navigates as a unit, making decisions about where to go and how to escape predators together.

“There’s a swarm intelligence,” Dr. Couzin said. “You can see how people thought there was some sort of telekinesis involved.”

What makes this collective decision-making all the more puzzling is that each individual can behave only based on its own experience. If a shark lunges into a school of fish, only some of them will see it coming. If a flock of birds is migrating, only a few experienced individuals may know the route.

Dr. Couzin and his colleagues have built a model of the flow of information through swarms. Each individual has to balance two instincts: to stay with the group and to move in a desired direction. The scientists found that just a few leaders can guide a swarm effectively. They do not even need to send any special signals to the animals around them. They create a bias in the swarm’s movement that steers it in a particular direction.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean you have the right information, though,” Dr. Couzin pointed out.

Two leaders may try to pull a swarm in opposite directions, and yet the swarm holds together. In Dr. Couzin’s model, the swarm was able to decide which leaders to follow.

“As we increased the difference of opinion between the informed individuals, the group would spontaneously come to a consensus and move in the direction chosen by the majority,” Dr. Couzin said. “They can make these decisions without mathematics, without even recognizing each other or knowing that a decision has been made.”

Dr. Couzin and his colleagues have been finding support for this model in real groups of animals. They have even found support in studies on mediocre swarmers — humans.

To study humans, Dr. Couzin teamed up with researchers at the University of Leeds. They recruited eight people at a time to play a game. Players stood in the middle of a circle, and along the edge of the circle were 16 cards, each labeled with a number. The scientists handed each person a slip of paper and instructed the players to follow the instructions printed on it while not saying anything to the others. Those rules correspond to the ones in Dr. Couzin’s models. And just as in his models, each person had no idea what the others had been instructed to do.

In one version of the experiment, each person was instructed simply to stay with the group. As Dr. Couzin’s model predicted, they tended to circle around in a doughnut-shaped flock. In another version, one person was instructed to head for a particular card at the edge of the circle without leaving the group. The players quickly formed little swarms with their leader at the head, moving together to the target.

The scientists then sowed discord by telling two or more people to move to opposite sides of the circle. The other people had to try to stay with the group even as leaders tried to pull it apart.

As Dr. Couzin’s model predicted, the human swarm made a quick, unconscious decision about which way to go. People tended to follow the largest group of leaders, even if it contained only one additional person.

Dr. Couzin and his colleagues describe the results of these experiments in a paper to be published in the journal Animal Behavior.

Dr. Couzin is carrying the lessons he has learned from animals to other kinds of swarms. He is helping Dr. Naomi Leonard, a Princeton engineer, to program swarming into robots.

“These things are beginning to move around and interact in ways we see in nature,” he said. Ultimately, flocks of robots might do a better job of collecting information in dangerous places. “If you knock out some individual, the algorithm still works. The group still moves normally.” The rules of the swarm may also apply to the cells inside our bodies. Dr. Couzin is working with cancer biologists to discover the rules by which cancer cells work together to build tumors or migrate through tissues. Even brain cells may follow the same rules for collective behavior seen in locusts or fish.

“One of the really fun things that we’re doing now is understanding how the type of feedbacks in these groups is like the ones in the brain that allows humans to make decisions,” Dr. Couzin said. Those decisions are not just about what to order for lunch, but about basic perception — making sense, for example, of the flood of signals coming from the eyes. “How does your brain take this information and come to a collective decision about what you’re seeing?” Dr. Couzin said. The answer, he suspects, may lie in our inner swarm.

Alex Rodriguez said all season that he wanted to stay with the Yankees, and now he is backing up those statements. Rodriguez and his wife, Cynthia, met with Hank and Hal Steinbrenner yesterday in Tampa, Fla., and Hank Steinbrenner said Rodriguez wanted to return.

“He has expressed a desire to stay a Yankee,” Steinbrenner said in a telephone interview. “He’s even willing to make certain sacrifices to do so.”

Rodriguez confirmed on his Web site that he had spoken with the Steinbrenners, saying that he believed he “had to respond to certain Yankees concerns.”

“Prior to entering into serious negotiations with other clubs, I wanted the opportunity to share my thoughts directly with Yankees ownership,” the Web site statement said. “We know there are other opportunities for us, but Cynthia and I have a foundation with the club that has brought us comfort, stability and happiness.”

Rodriguez, who held the meeting without his agent, Scott Boras, added that he expected the dialogue with the Yankees to continue the next few days.

The Yankees had hoped to have those discussions before Rodriguez opted out of his contract during Game 4 of the World Series on Oct. 28. The absence of Boras from yesterday’s meeting could eventually lead to a new contract.

“I’m not sure it’s going to happen immediately, but it’s going to happen,” said a friend of Rodriguez’s, speaking on condition of anonymity because Rodriguez had not authorized him to speak publicly.

“It’s a relief for Alex to know that the Yankees still want him, and now that he knows that, he’s going to work something out. Whatever they have to do to work it out, they’re going to do it. He was willing to eat crow, and he did.”

After Rodriguez opted out, the Yankees insisted they would not pursue him as a free agent. But within a week of his decision, Rodriguez began telling friends that he was dismayed at the public fallout and was considering giving the Yankees a discount to return.

That feeling has grown stronger, and it is believed that Rodriguez is now willing to make up for the subsidy the Yankees lost from the Texas Rangers when he opted out.

“There’s a strong possibility that he’ll come back, with the way the negotiations are now,” said another friend of Rodriguez’s, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “There are just a few minor things to figure out.”

The Yankees are wary that Rodriguez’s new stance may be a trap to lure them into negotiations and thus drive up Rodriguez’s price in the marketplace. But they seem to believe he is sincere in his desire to return.

Rodriguez is free to negotiate with other teams, but no team — except perhaps the Los Angeles Angels — has seemed willing to give Rodriguez a raise over the $32 million he could have made in 2009 and 2010 under his original Rangers deal.

The lukewarm market was one of the reasons Rodriguez came back to the Yankees, and another was his business empire. Rodriguez has a real-estate business, a Mercedes-Benz dealership and endorsement contracts, and he believes he can maximize those assets by staying a Yankee.

Boras, who did not return a telephone call, has been adamant that Rodriguez deserves a raise over the $32 million, though the Yankees are unwilling to go that high.

Last month — in the offer Boras and Rodriguez would not let the Yankees make — the team was prepared to add five years and about $150 million to the existing three years and $91 million on his deal. The Yankees probably would have stretched the extension to seven years, through 2017.

The Rangers would have paid $30 million of the $91 million covering 2008 through 2010. Because the Yankees want that money back from Rodriguez, they would probably re-sign him now for 10 years and about $270 million.

That deal would eclipse Rodriguez’s 10-year, $252 million contract given by the Rangers’ owner, Tom Hicks, in 2000. Boras has argued that Rodriguez deserves far more now, given the increased revenues in the major leagues.

But most people in baseball consider the Hicks contract to be drastically overpriced; in the seven years since, no player has topped an average salary of even $20 million on a multiyear deal.

If he agreed to a deal with the Yankees for 10 years and about $270 million, Rodriguez (and Boras) could save face by breaking a salary record. Also, by living up to his words and returning to the Yankees, the image-conscious Rodriguez may be able to erase some of the stain on his legacy.

Steinbrenner had tried to arrange a meeting with Rodriguez last month, but Rodriguez would not return his calls. Boras said later that he never allowed clients to talk about money with teams, and he was convinced that the Yankees would have presented an offer if they had met with Rodriguez before he opted out.

The Yankees believed that Boras wanted a $350 million commitment before any meeting, a notion Boras has countered by saying he had not yet discussed money with the Yankees.

In any case, while the Yankees understand that Rodriguez has a right to representation, the sign that he was willing to talk without Boras is encouraging to them. But it does not mean that Rodriguez will necessarily fire Boras.

In 2001, another Boras client, Andruw Jones, reached an impasse in negotiations with the Atlanta Braves. Jones called General Manager John Schuerholz and arranged a meeting. With his father advising him, Jones worked out a six-year, $75 million deal, yet retained Boras as his agent.

It is unknown who brokered the resumption of Rodriguez’s negotiations with the Yankees. But the sudden twist seems likely to end the same way as Jones’s negotiation did: with Rodriguez returning to his team.

INSIDE PITCH

Yankees left fielder Hideki Matsui had arthroscopic surgery on his right knee in New York yesterday and is expected to be ready for spring training.

AS Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America’s two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general.

So what if America’s chief law enforcement official won’t say that waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. You’re either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you’re with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad.

In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally condemned as the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the epitome of White House hypocrisy and incompetence. But that’s not exactly news. It’s been apparent for years that America was suicidal to go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while showering billions of dollars on Pakistan, where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection of a con man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden.

General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still does, with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White House on Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda” and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country harboring terrorists will be “regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

A memorable highlight of our special relationship with this prized “ally” came in September 2006, when the general turned up in Washington to kick off his book tour. Asked about the book by a reporter at a White House press conference, he said he was contractually “honor bound” to remain mum until it hit the stores — thus demonstrating that Simon & Schuster had more clout with him than the president. This didn’t stop Mr. Bush from praising General Musharraf for his recently negotiated “truce” to prevent further Taliban inroads in northwestern Pakistan. When the Pakistani strongman “looks me in the eye” and says “there won’t be a Taliban and won’t be Al Qaeda,” the president said, “I believe him.”

Sooner than you could say “Putin,” The Daily Telegraph of London reported that Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, had signed off on this “truce.” Since then, the Pakistan frontier has become a more thriving terrorist haven than ever.

Now The Los Angeles Times reports that much of America’s $10 billion-plus in aid to Pakistan has gone to buy conventional weaponry more suitable for striking India than capturing terrorists. To rub it in last week, General Musharraf released 25 pro-Taliban fighters in a prisoner exchange with a tribal commander the day after he suspended the constitution.

But there’s another moral to draw from the Musharraf story, and it has to do with domestic policy, not foreign. The Pakistan mess, as The New York Times editorial page aptly named it, is not just another blot on our image abroad and another instance of our mismanagement of the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It also casts a harsh light on the mess we have at home in America, a stain that will not be so easily eradicated.

In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We’ve become inured to democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.

This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf’s.

More Machiavellian still, Mr. Bush has constantly told the world he’s championing democracy even as he strangles it. Mr. Bush repeated the word “freedom” 27 times in roughly 20 minutes at his 2005 inauguration, and even presided over a “Celebration of Freedom” concert on the Ellipse hosted by Ryan Seacrest. It was an Orwellian exercise in branding, nothing more. The sole point was to give cover to our habitual practice of cozying up to despots (especially those who control the oil spigots) and to our own government’s embrace of warrantless wiretapping and torture, among other policies that invert our values.

Even if Mr. Bush had the guts to condemn General Musharraf, there is no longer any moral high ground left for him to stand on. Quite the contrary. Rather than set a democratic example, our president has instead served as a model of unconstitutional behavior, eagerly emulated by his Pakistani acolyte.

Take the Musharraf assault on human-rights lawyers. Our president would not be so unsubtle as to jail them en masse. But earlier this year a senior Pentagon official, since departed, threatened America’s major white-shoe law firms by implying that corporate clients should fire any firm whose partners volunteer to defend detainees in Guantánamo and elsewhere. For its part, Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department did not round up independent-minded United States attorneys and toss them in prison. It merely purged them without cause to serve Karl Rove’s political agenda.

Tipping his hat in appreciation of Mr. Bush’s example, General Musharraf justified his dismantling of Pakistan’s Supreme Court with language mimicking the president’s diatribes against activist judges. The Pakistani leader further echoed Mr. Bush by expressing a kinship with Abraham Lincoln, citing Lincoln’s Civil War suspension of a prisoner’s fundamental legal right to a hearing in court, habeas corpus, as a precedent for his own excesses. (That’s like praising F.D.R. for setting up internment camps.) Actually, the Bush administration has outdone both Lincoln and Musharraf on this score: Last January, Mr. Gonzales testified before Congress that “there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.”

To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.

This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it. They’re falling over each other to expand Gitmo, see who can promise the most torture and abridge the largest number of constitutional rights. The front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, boasts a proven record in extralegal executive power grabs, Musharraf-style: After 9/11 he tried to mount a coup, floating the idea that he stay on as mayor in defiance of New York’s term-limits law.

What makes the Democrats’ Mukasey cave-in so depressing is that it shows how far even exemplary sticklers for the law like Senators Feinstein and Schumer have lowered democracy’s bar. When they argued that Mr. Mukasey should be confirmed because he’s not as horrifying as Mr. Gonzales or as the acting attorney general who might get the job otherwise, they sounded whipped. After all these years of Bush-Cheney torture, they’ll say things they know are false just to move on.

In a Times OpEd article justifying his reluctant vote to confirm a man Dick Cheney promised would make “an outstanding attorney general,” Mr. Schumer observed that waterboarding is already “illegal under current laws and conventions.” But then he vowed to support a new bill “explicitly” making waterboarding illegal because Mr. Mukasey pledged to enforce it. Whatever. Even if Congress were to pass such legislation, Mr. Bush would veto it, and even if the veto were by some miracle overturned, Mr. Bush would void the law with a “signing statement.” That’s what he effectively did in 2005 when he signed a bill that its authors thought outlawed the torture of detainees.

That Mr. Schumer is willing to employ blatant Catch-22 illogic to pretend that Mr. Mukasey’s pledge on waterboarding has any force shows what pathetic crumbs the Democrats will settle for after all these years of being beaten down. The judges and lawyers challenging General Musharraf have more fight left in them than this.

Last weekend a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that the Democratic-controlled Congress and Mr. Bush are both roundly despised throughout the land, and that only 24 percent of Americans believe their country is on the right track. That’s almost as low as the United States’ rock-bottom approval ratings in the latest Pew surveys of Pakistan (15 percent) and Turkey (9 percent).

Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 11 — Bonnie Brown was fresh from a nasty divorce in 1999, living with her sister and uncertain of her future. On a lark, she answered an ad for an in-house masseuse at Google, then a Silicon Valley start-up with 40 employees. She was offered the part-time job, which started out at $450 a week but included a pile of Google stock options that she figured might never be worth a penny.

After five years of kneading engineers’ backs, Ms. Brown retired, cashing in most of her stock options, which were worth millions of dollars. To her delight, the shares she held onto have continued to balloon in value.

“I’m happy I saved enough stock for a rainy day, and lately it’s been pouring,” said Ms. Brown, 52, who now lives in a 3,000-square-foot house in Nevada, gets her own massages at least once a week and has a private Pilates instructor. She has traveled the world to oversee a charitable foundation she started with her Google wealth and has written a book, still unpublished, “Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google.”

When Google’s stock topped $700 a share last week before dropping back to $664 on Friday, outside shareholders were not the only ones smiling. According to documents filed on Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Google employees and former employees are holding options they can cash in worth about $2.1 billion. In addition, current employees are sitting on stock and unvested options, or options they cannot immediately cash in, that together have a value of about $4.1 billion.

Although no one keeps an official count of Google millionaires, it is estimated that 1,000 people each have more than $5 million worth of Google shares from stock grants and stock options.

One founder, Larry Page, has stock worth $20 billion. The other, Sergey Brin, has slightly less, $19.6 billion, according to Equilar, an executive compensation research firm in Redwood Shores, Calif. Three Google senior vice presidents — David Drummond, the chief legal officer; Shona Brown, who runs business operations; and Jonathan Rosenberg, who oversees product management — together are holding $160 million worth of Google stock and options.

“This is a very rare phenomenon when one company so quickly becomes worth so much money,” said Peter Hero, senior adviser to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which works with individuals and corporations to support charitable organizations in the region. “During the boom times, there were lots of companies whose employees made a lot of money fast, like Yahoo and Netscape. But the scale didn’t approach Google.”

Indeed, Google has seemed to exist in its own microclimate, with its shares climbing even as other technology stocks have been buffeted by investor skittishness. The stock touched an all-time high of $747.24 on Tuesday before falling more than $83 a share during the week to close at $663.97 on Friday. But even after that sell-off, the stock has risen more than 44 percent, or $203 a share, this year.

The days are long gone when people like Ms. Brown were handed thousands of Google options with the exercise price, or the pre-determined price that employees would pay to buy the stock, set in pennies. Nearly half of the 16,000 employees now at Google have been there for a year or less, and their options have an average exercise price of more than $500. But those who started at the company a year ago, or even three months ago, are seeing their options soar in value.

Several Google employees interviewed for this article say they do not watch the dizzying climb of the company’s shares. When it comes to awareness of the stock price, they say, Google is different from other large high-tech companies where they have worked, like Microsoft, where the day’s stock price is a fixture on many people’s computer screens.

At Google, the sensibility is more nuanced, they say. “It isn’t considered ‘Googley’ to check the stock price,” said an engineer, using the Google jargon for what is acceptable in the company’s culture. As a result, there is a bold insistence, at least on the surface, that the stock price does not matter, said the engineer, who did not want to be named because it is considered unseemly to discuss the price.

Others admit that, when gathered around the espresso machine it is hard to avoid the topic of their sudden windfalls.

“It’s very clear that people are taking nicer vacations,” said one Google engineer, who asked not to be identified because it is also not Googley to talk about personal fortunes made at the company. “And one of the guys who works for me but has been there longer showed up at work in a really, really nice new car.”

The rise in Google’s stock is affecting the deepest reaches of the company. The number of options granted to new employees at Google usually depends on the position and the salary level at which the employee is hired, and the value is usually based on the price of the stock at the start of employment.

The average options grant for a new Google employee — or “Noogler” — who started in November 2006 was 685 shares at a price of roughly $475 a share. They also would have received, on average, 230 shares of stock outright that will vest over a number of years.

The Nooglers might not be talking about second homes in Aspen or personal jets, but they are talking about down payments on a first home, new cars and kitchen renovations. Internal online discussion groups about personal finance are closely read.

Google, like many Silicon Valley companies, gives each of its new employees stock options, as well as a smaller number of shares of Google stock, as a recruiting incentive.

The idea of employment at a place with such a high stock price is appealing, but it can also make the company less attractive to a new hire. Jordan Moncharmont, 21, a senior at Stanford University who was given stock options after he started working at Facebook part time, said Google’s high stock price can be a disincentive to a prospective hire as it translates to a high exercise price for options. “You’d have to spend a boatload of cash to exercise your options,” he said.

Mr. Moncharmont said he did not join Facebook to get rich, though he knows his Facebook options could make him wealthy someday.

When Ms. Brown left Google, the stock price had merely doubled from its initial offering price of $85. So Ms. Brown is glad she ignored the advice of her financial advisers and held onto a cache of stock.

As the stock continues to defy gravity, Ms. Brown, whose foundation has its assets in Google stock, can be more generous with her charity. “It seems that every time I give some away, it just keeps filling up again,” she said. “It’s like an overflowing pot.”

The wealth generated by options is giving a lot of people like Ms. Brown the freedom to leave and do whatever they like.

Ron Garret, an engineer who was Google’s 104th employee, worked there for a little more than a year, leaving in 2001. When he eventually sold all his stock, he became a venture capitalist and a philanthropist. He has also become a documentary filmmaker and is currently chronicling homelessness in Santa Monica, Calif.

“The stock price rise doesn’t affect me at all,” he said, “except just gazing at it in wonderment.”

IN 2003, as Howard Dean‘s presidential bid surged, the Internet was hailed as a decisive new factor in electoral politics. In 2007, the explosive growth of online social networks seems poised to drive a similar upheaval in the world of philanthropy.

A flood of new ventures — like Bill Clinton‘s MyCommitment.org and Dollars for Darfur, an initiative by two high-school students — aim to use Web-based communities to raise money for charitable causes.

So far, the amounts raised online are relatively tiny. But they are increasing rapidly, paralleling the expansion of social networks themselves. The research firm Datamonitor estimates that by the end of this year sites like Facebook and MySpace will have more than 230 million members.

Until recently, philanthropic groups could accomplish little online beyond highlighting problems and trumpeting goals and programs, said Allison Fine, a senior fellow at Demos, a policy research group in New York, and the author of “Momentum: Igniting Change in the Connected Age.”

“Web 1.0 was a broadcast phenomenon; the Clinton Global Initiative would have just told us what it was doing,” Ms. Fine said. “Now, in this new interactive world, it’s a two-way conversation.”

MyCommitment.org, which was introduced in September, aims to forge connections among people who make commitments of time or money to political or social causes and want to encourage friends, online and off, to do the same.

“Giving is something that we can all do, but too often people don’t know where or how to give,” Mr. Clinton said by e-mail. “MyCommitment.org is a portal that inspires people to give and makes it easy to do so.” More than 750 people around the world responded in its first month.

“The commitments range from working with students to foster intercultural dialogue to an 8- and 6-year-old brother and sister team who have pledged to raise more than $200,000 to help blind children in India,” Mr. Clinton said.

Dollars for Darfur began after Nick Anderson, a high-school senior in Mount Hermon, Mass., visited South Africa on a school trip last year and became interested in the humanitarian crisis. He and a classmate, Ana Slavin, decided to use the Web to raise awareness among other students and money for the cause.

“We were using these social networks every day,” Mr. Anderson said. “It was a big part of our lives. And we knew there were millions of other teenagers checking them two or three times a day, too.” Their campaign, now part of the Save Darfur Coalition, an umbrella group of national religious organizations, raised $306,000 during the last school year.

Mr. Anderson, who is now a youth ambassador for Oxfam America, visited the Abu Shouk refugee camp in Darfur this summer. A second Dollars for Darfur drive, aiming to raise $375,000, is under way.

SaveDarfur.org is one of the top draws at the Causes on Facebook Project, added to Facebook, the social networking site, when it was opened to outside software developers in May. Causes allows Facebook users to set up Web pages to promote charitable or other activist goals. Perhaps more important, Causes pages can be used to solicit and keep track of donations.

In its first five months, Causes was downloaded by 6.3 million of Facebook’s 51 million users, with another 75,000 or so registering daily, said Sean Parker, 27, who developed it.

While some 25,000 causes have been created and $600,000 raised, Mr. Parker said, his priority was to demonstrate the platform’s potential. “We want to help charities raise money,” he said. “But at this point we’re focusing on making people realize the power of the tool.”

Mr. Parker, a founder of the early file-sharing service Napster, said sites like Causes offered philanthropists a new way to build momentum because they take social pressures into cyberspace. “Your Facebook profile is seen by many more people every day than you are,” he said.

Social networking also gives charities a chance to lessen their reliance on big donors, a trend that began 30 years ago. “In that sort of world, young people are left out of the equation,” Mr. Parker said. “If you can engage them, you can engage a much larger population.”

Engagement is helped by the fact that people go online to get news and information, especially “at times of crisis,” said Susan P. Crawford, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School and an expert on Internet law and technology. “And just as people rush to the Web to get news about crises, they rush to the Web to help out.”

Ms. Crawford said that sites like Causes allow people to voice support, make a donation and encourage others to join in, all with a few clicks.

While agreeing that the Web offers a sense of immediacy “that very few if any other fund-raising strategies provide,” Timothy L. Seiler, director of the Fund Raising School at Indiana University‘s Center on Philanthropy, said it would be a mistake to assume that the Web has “revolutionized” philanthropy. Since the Web’s early days, he added, “what we’ve seen is that the reality has never matched what people perceived to be the potential.”

About a third of the nonprofit groups surveyed recently by the Center on Philanthropy reported success with Internet fund-raising, about double the rate in 2000. But 24 percent of those that received donations online said the average gift was under $10. A recent survey of 103 organizations by The Chronicle of Philanthropy also put the trend in perspective, suggesting that online gifts totaled less than 1 percent of donations.

Raising money online, meanwhile, raises sticky questions, especially for larger charities. “Trust issues are still a big factor,” said Michael Schreiber, chief technical officer at United Way of America, which this year expects to raise about $400 million (out of $4.1 billion) through various online channels but is undecided about whether to undertake a Facebook-style social networking initiative.

“You really have to understand how your donors will feel about it,” Mr. Schreiber said, “and how you are going to make sure that you’re stewarding the information and transactions in a way that everybody is comfortable with. I don’t believe the sector is there yet.”

Matthew Hale, an assistant professor at Seton Hall University who studies the interaction of the news media and the nonprofit sector, drew a parallel with another Web phenomenon. “No one could touch Howard Dean online, yet he still lost,” he said. “This is an important trend, and one that is clearly going to continue to grow. But it is not going to wipe away the ways that philanthropy has happened for hundreds of years.”

Still, no one is denying that the Internet has provoked new thinking.

“It was really the teenagers across the country that did most of the work for us,” said Mr. Anderson. “People need a forum to get involved.”

SERIOUS moviegoers tend to view the Oscars as a sideshow, and a déclassé one at that, with little relation to quality cinema. Important Films, the convention holds, do not don a revealing frock and traipse the red carpet, risking a fondling by Isaac Mizrahi.

But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ growing tendency to nominate and vote for ambitious, risky films — movies that reside outside the forest of studio blockbusters — suggests that the annual bacchanal actually nurtures important work.

In a business that is almost always about the money, the appeal to vanity — a shot at the most coveted prize in almost any industry — has yielded the so-called Oscar film, a movie aimed at adults that makes its debut late in the year with an eye toward getting a date with the statue. The current season is thick with such releases: “Atonement,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” “Into the Wild,” “Lars and the Real Girl,” “Michael Clayton,” “No Country for Old Men,” “There Will Be Blood” and many others. Oscar hopes undoubtedly played a role in the executive decision to approve these movies, which are not exactly going to have hordes of teenagers lining up at the multiplex.

That is not to say that absent gold-plated dreams, some of these films wouldn’t have been made, only that more of them made it to a significant number of theaters, and did so with the kind of budgets and stars that can make for great movies. If the conceit holds true — industry insiders say the word “Oscar” comes up in serious movie pitches as much as “and” and “the” — people who care about serious “fil-lims” should skip the marathon of Iranian documentaries on Feb. 24 and assemble some friends and nachos to watch this year’s Oscars, with Jon Stewart as host.

It would be nice if there were a pot of gold statues at the end of this particular holiday season, because after healthy summer box-office grosses it’s been brutal out there. All sorts of serious movies have collided and then collapsed in the fight for audiences. The filmgoing public is all the better for all these movies, but the dreary financial numbers will go down a little better if film companies are in the hunt for an Oscar, the kind of recognition that could provide a boost for movies that still have a ways to go to recoup their costs.

The general formula for most filmmaking could be broken down thusly: Concept + stars + brute-force marketing = hoped-for payday. The studio system, with a need to appeal to plenty of people with huge opening weekends, does not generally lead to great cinema. But when the hydraulics of prestige are introduced into that equation, odd and wonderful things can happen. Big paydays are forgone by actors, directors work with (and for) far less money, and studios put money and promotion into films that have limited financial horizons. Actors, producers and directors know that when all is said and done, their obituaries are not going to mention their lifetime box-office tallies. The Oscars, by forcefully acknowledging artistic excellence, help people access the angels of their better natures.

“Oscar movies can be a kind of check and balance that can produce innovation, movies that break new ground and point the way for the future,” said David Poland of the Web site Movie City News (moviecitynews.com).

Making movies is a trying collective endeavor, and attempting to make one that contains difficult subject matter — the best-picture nominees in 2005 tackled journalism, homophobia, racism and terrorism — can be Sisyphean. No one ever got chased off a studio lot for not failing to back, say, a multilingual triptych about the vagaries of human communication like “Babel,” a movie that Paramount Vantage backed last year to a best-picture nomination. John Lesher, president of Paramount Vantage, Paramount’s specialty film division, said the film was made because it was a good idea, not because it might win awards. But once “Babel” was in the hunt, “it helped brand the film,” he said. “It is less about making a prestige film than the fact that actors want to do good work in addition to making blockbusters. The best, most interesting careers do both.”

And if generating great big box-office returns were the only consideration, how much work would we be seeing from Philip Seymour Hoffman, the anti-movie star who hardly meets the studio standard for “relatability” but seems to be one of the best actors on the planet and won the best-actor Oscar for the 2005 film “Capote”? As it is, he is present this season in “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” and “The Savages.”

“Think of how many projects get made because their backers think or hope or dream that they are going to be Oscar movies,” said Sasha Stone, the longtime Academy blogger who runs Awards Daily (awardsdaily.com). “The answer this year, and most, is a lot.”

Much of the Oscar appetite is coming from the actors themselves. After Halle Berry revealed much of herself in “Monster’s Ball” for a best-actress win for 2001 and Charlize Theron disappeared under mounds of makeup in “Monster” to similar effect for the 2003 award, actors realized that more than ever, forgoing a big check in the short run for a vivid turn in a high-quality movie could lead to long-running credibility and perhaps bigger roles down the road.

“Actors and directors say the word to their agents, and their agents say it to them to get them to do a movie,” said Mark Gill, chief executive of the Film Department, a new independent company. “It may not be the sun — the be-all and end-all — but it is certainly the moon, with a significant gravitational pull.”

Industry executives said that the Oscars have become part of the lexicon of making deals, with contracts that offer bonuses for nominations and awards, even getting down to the specifics of an Oscar campaign in support of the movie. And a financial calculus of another sort is entering the picture along with some of the newer players in the industry.

“There’s a lot of fresh money coming into our business,” said David T. Friendly, who received a nomination last year as a producer of “Little Miss Sunshine.” “Most of these investors have already made their fortunes. So what are they really after? A lot of them are trying to make films that make a difference and movies that might land them that ultimate prize.”

And say what you want about the Oscars, there is no sure-fire way to game the Academy process, other than finding great directors and giving them the resources to make an ambitious film. Cynics and outsiders like to suggest that Academy members are too far removed from the cultural mainstream to reflect the best of contemporary cinema. But a look at the choices for best picture in recent years suggests that they don’t always play it safe. In 2005 “Million Dollar Baby” came out of nowhere to win, and “Crash” took the same route in 2006. Like them or hate them, they still represented fully realized visions that had nothing to do with selling action figures.

The allure of the Oscar is precious precisely because there are so few of them — one best movie, one best actor, one best actress — and because the award maintains fundamental integrity. The Academy process, for all its excesses, still carries great weight in the industry in part because it represents the will of 5,800 members from all branches of the industry, both active and retired.

“A lot of us in the Academy take our membership as a kind of fiduciary responsibility,” said Robert Shaye, co-chief executive of New Line Cinema. “We are being asked what we want the world to see of our industry, and that inspires respect and even some awe from those who accept the responsibility.”

Sure, there are occasional outrages — few would argue in retrospect that “Dances With Wolves” is a better movie than “Goodfellas,” as the Academy did in 1990 — but things started to change in the mid-1990s, most especially in 1996. That’s when four small movies — “The English Patient,” which won, “Fargo,” “Secrets and Lies” and “Shine” — all became best-picture finalists, along with a single big-studio picture, “Jerry Maguire.” And under Harvey Weinstein, Miramax proved that a specialty division, albeit with Disney’s backing, could fight from the hills and win it all, as it did with “Shakespeare in Love” in the awards for 1998.

James Schamus, chief executive of Focus Features, Universal’s boutique division, pointed out that many of the current Academy members came of age professionally in the ’60s and ’70s during an explosion of ambitious cinema. Their reflex, he said, is toward taking artistic risks.

“The Academy has stepped out of the mainstream in many of their choices over the past few years because many of the people who are voting have that rebel spirit from those days,” said Mr. Schamus, whose offerings this Oscar season include “Atonement” and Ang Lee‘s “Lust, Caution.” “But there is no sure way to make that happen. You can’t put the cart before the horse. We all have dreams of holding a statue and thanking all the little people, but you have to do the work on a great movie that succeeds in a very certain way. And that’s no simple matter.”