PHOENIX — There is no sauna, no heated pool, no chauffeur or sommelier. In fact, no alcohol is allowed on the premises, and guests share a bathroom with their next-door neighbor.

But for $250 a night in a city where Super Bowl rentals are topping out at $250,000 a week for a mansion in Scottsdale, the sisters at Our Lady of Guadalupe Monastery figure they have an offer that cannot be beat.

In debt from the recent purchase of a nearby parcel, the Benedictine nuns are hoping to make a dent in their mortgage by converting their 10-bedroom spiritual retreat into a crash pad for Super Bowl fans this weekend.

“A Super Bowl doesn’t happen in a city very often,” said Sister Linda Campbell, the prioress of the monastery where rooms usually go for $105 a night. “Then we heard of all the folks that were renting out homes and we thought, wow, that would be something that would be beneficial to the monastery and help us to help others.”

With 125,000 fans expected to arrive from out of town this weekend, even midlevel hotels are charging more than $500 a night for rooms. A Hampton Inn, for example, is sold out for the weekend at prices up to $799 a night. Not far away, a Residence Inn by Marriott on Wednesday still had a two-bedroom suite available for $999 a night.

With its posters of Mother Teresa, vinyl tablecloths and second-hand furniture, the monastery’s offerings do not match up to some of the Super Bowl packages that nearby hotels and resorts are offering, with free cocktail hours, personal concierge service and sometimes even a meet-and-greet with N.F.L. players. Though there is no curfew at the monastery, some Super Bowl visitors may be dismayed to learn that along with the ban on alcohol (forget about keg stands or late-night drinking games), overnight guests cannot smoke.

Guests at the monastery will sleep in single beds in rooms named after Saints Hildegard, Helen, Monica and Ann. Most of the rooms sleep three people, and there is no telephone or television in the rooms.

Still, the retreat has its charms. The nine-year-old monastery is only three and a half miles from University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., and is nestled improbably in a working-class suburban neighborhood. Bottlebrush and palm trees shade the monastery, and a peacock roams the grounds. A yellow Labrador named Bonito greets guests at the front door.

Clint Mills Jr., 38, of Shrewsbury, Mass., said he knew he would travel to Arizona if the Patriots won, but he was dreading the cost of a hotel room for him and his 6-year-old son, Clint Mills III. This will be Mills’s fifth Super Bowl, and he was aware that even the most basic hotel rooms would be $500 a night. Then he saw a story on his local television station about the monastery.

“When I saw it on the news, I was like, Oh my god,” Mills said. “I don’t have to worry about who’s coming down the hallway at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning.”

Sister Linda, 59, works as a guidance counselor at St. Mary’s High School, a local Catholic school, and lives at the monastery with another nun and a live-in associate, a woman who has dedicated herself to a spiritual life but has not taken vows to join the order. Throughout the year, the sisters play host to church groups, nonprofit organizations and individuals who arrive seeking spiritual renewal and contemplation. The retreat is so popular that it has outgrown its space, and the order spent $550,000 on a nearby parcel last April so the monastery could be expanded.

The mood at the monastery may seem more prayerful than pumped up, but football fans will find a kindred spirit in Sister Linda, who has season tickets to the Arizona Cardinals and loves to lose herself in the shoves and grunts of a hard-fought game.

“It is violent, but not as violent as some others,” she said. “Now, I’m not into boxing or some of those. But football, yeah, I like football. For the most part, it’s a down time for me, and a time to just sit back and just enjoy it.”

Sister Linda said she admired Eli Manning and Tom Brady — “they’re both talented men,” she said of the two quarterbacks — but added that she was rooting for the Patriots. “They’ve had a perfect season, and it would be so sad to lose at this point,” she said.

Seven of the 10 rooms are already booked. None of the guests were bothered by the ban on alcohol or the monastery’s subdued setting, Sister Linda said.

“I think there’s a uniqueness about the people who are coming,” she said. Some of the guests, including a nun from New York, are Catholic; others are not. “It’s just like there was a reason for them to come to this area, for this purpose.”

The arrangement worked perfectly for George Huntoon, a Patriots fan from Dover, Mass., who does not drink alcohol and was shocked at some of the hotel prices he saw when planning his trip. “You know it’s going to be nice and clean,” said Huntoon, who is 50 and owns a building-supply store. “It’s a good thing just to get a little peace of mind before the game. I’m kind of looking forward to it.”

If those who arrive seek spiritual guidance, Sister Linda and her colleagues can provide it. But if they just want to enjoy the game, she said, that is O.K., too.

Still, several visitors have told her they would like to participate in Sunday Mass. If the guests pray for their own team to win, Sister Linda will understand; she admitted to praying once or twice for her beloved Cardinals.

“The way I do it is I pray for them to do the best they can,” she said, before offering a word of caution.

“Everyone has to understand,” she said, “that God listens to both sides.”

About one in six combat troops returning from Iraq have suffered at least one concussion in the war, injuries that, while temporary, could heighten their risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder, researchers are reporting.

The study, in The New England Journal of Medicine, is the military’s first large-scale effort to gauge the effect of mild head injuries — concussions, many of them from roadside blasts — that some experts worry may be causing a host of undiagnosed neurological deficiencies.

The new report found that soldiers who had concussions were more likely than those with other injuries to report a variety of physical and mental symptoms in their first months back home, including headaches, poor sleep and balance problems. But they were also at higher risk for the stress disorder, or PTSD, and that accounted for most of the difference in complaints, the researchers concluded. Symptoms of the disorder include irritability, sleep problems and flashbacks.

Experts cautioned that the study had not been designed to detect subtle changes in mental performance, like slips in concentration or short-term memory, that might have developed in the wake of a concussion and might be unrelated to stress reactions. Many returning veterans are still struggling with those problems, which can linger for months.

The findings are in line with previous research linking concussions to post-traumatic stress disorder that develops after frightening events outside a military context, like car accidents; concussions from athletic collisions rarely lead to the disorder.

“This study is a very good first step, and an important one, but like any first step it should lead us to ask further questions about these injuries,” said Brian Levine, a neuropsychologist at the Rotman Research Institute and the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the study.

Now that the prevalence of combat concussions is better known, Dr. Levine said, the next step should be to assess troops’ cognitive functioning early on and track it over time, before and after combat.

In the study, military psychiatrists had 2,525 soldiers from two Army infantry brigades fill out questionnaires asking about missed workdays and dozens of kinds of physical and emotional difficulties, including symptoms of PTSD. The soldiers had been back home from Iraq for three to four months.

The questionnaires also asked about concussions and their severity. A concussion is an injury from a blow or shock to the head that causes temporary confusion or loss of consciousness, without any visible brain damage. The investigators found that 384 of the soldiers, or 15 percent, reported at least one concussion. One-third of that 15 percent had blacked out when injured.

The severity of the concussion was related to the risk of developing the stress disorder, the survey showed. Nearly 44 percent of the soldiers who had blacked out qualified for the diagnosis, about three times the rate found in soldiers with other injuries. Among soldiers who did not black out, the rate of PTSD was 27 percent, significantly higher than the 16 percent rate among veterans with other kinds of injuries.

“There’s a lot we don’t know about these injuries, but we do know that context is important,” said the lead author, Dr. Charles W. Hoge, director of the division of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. “Being in combat, you’re going to be in a physiologically heightened state already. Now imagine a blast that knocks you unconscious — an extremely close call on your own life, and maybe your buddy went down. So you’ve got the trauma, and maybe the effect of the concussion is to make it worse.”

In an editorial that accompanied the study, Richard A. Bryant, a psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, emphasized that concussed troops “should not be led to believe that they have a brain injury that will result in permanent damage.”

On the contrary, Dr. Bryant and other experts say, the link to post-traumatic stress suggests that mild brain injuries have a significant psychological component, which can improve with treatment.

Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said the study, and the interest of doctors and military officials in brain trauma, were long overdue.

WASHINGTON

Even newly armored by the spirit of Camelot, Barack Obama is still distressed by the sight of a certain damsel.

It’s already famous as The Snub, the moment before the State of the Union when Obama turned away to talk to Claire McCaskill instead of trying to join Teddy Kennedy in shaking hands with Hillary.

Nobody cared about W., whose presidency had crumpled into a belated concern about earmarks.

The only union that fascinated was Obama and Hillary, once more creeping around each other.

It would have been the natural thing for the Illinois senator, only hours after his emotional embrace by the Kennedys and an arena full of deliriously shrieking students, to follow the lead of Uncle Teddy and greet the rebuffed Hillary.

She was impossible to miss in the sea of dark suits and Supreme Court dark robes. Like Scarlett O’Hara after a public humiliation, Hillary showed up at the gathering wearing a defiant shade of red.

But the fact that he didn’t do so shows that Obama cannot hide how much the Clintons rattle him, and that he is still taking the race very personally.

On a flight to Kansas yesterday to collect another big endorsement, this one from Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, Obama said he was “surprised” by reports of The Snub.

“I was turning away because Claire asked me a question as Senator Kennedy was reaching forward,” he said. “Senator Clinton and I have had very cordial relations off the floor and on the floor. I waved at her as I was coming into the Senate chamber before we walked over last night. I think there is just a lot more tea leaf reading going on here than I think people are suggesting.”

But that answer is disingenuous. Their relations have been frosty and fraught ever since the young Chicago prince challenged Queen Hillary’s royal proclamation that it was her turn to rule.

Last winter, after news broke that he was thinking of running, he winked at her and took her elbow on the Senate floor to say hi, in his customary languid, friendly way, and she coldly brushed him off.

It bothered him, and he called a friend to say: You would not believe what just happened with Hillary.

Again and again at debates, he looked eager to greet her or be friendly during the evening and she iced him. She might have frozen him out once more Monday night had he actually tried to reach out.

But now Obama is like that cat Mark Twain wrote about who wouldn’t jump on the stove again for fear of being burned.

It was only after the distortions of the Clintons in South Carolina that he changed his tone and took on Hillary in a tough way in the debate there. Afterward, one of his advisers said that it was as though a dam had broken and Obama finally began using all the sharp lines against Hillary that strategists had been suggesting for months.

Why had it taken so long for Obama to push back against Hillary? “He respected her as a senator,” the adviser replied. “He even defended her privately when she cried, saying that no one knows how hard these campaigns are.”

But Obama’s outrage makes him seem a little jejune. He is surely the only person in the country who was surprised when the Clintons teamed up to dissemble and smear when confronted with an impediment to their ambitions.

Knowing that it helped her when Obama seemed to be surly with her during the New Hampshire debate, telling her without looking up from his notes that she was “likable enough” — another instance of Obama not being able to hide his bruised feelings — Hillary went on ABC News last night to insinuate that he was rude Monday.

“Well, I reached my hand out in friendship and unity and my hand is still reaching out,” she said, lapsing back into the dissed-woman mode. “And I look forward to shaking his hand sometime soon.”

Something’s being stretched here, but it’s not her hand. She wasn’t reaching out to him at all.

The New York State chapter of NOW issued an absurd statement on Monday calling Teddy Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama “the ultimate betrayal”: “He’s picked the new guy over us.”

But Obama is the more emotionally delicate candidate, and the one who has the more feminine consensus management style, and the not-blinded-by-testosterone ability to object to a phony war.

As first lady, Alpha Hillary’s abrasive and secretive management of health care doomed it. She voted to enable W. on Iraq so she could run as someone tough enough to command armies.

Given her brazen quote to ABC News, Obama is right to be scared of Hillary. He just needs to learn that Uncle Teddy can’t fight all his fights, and that a little chivalry goes a long way.

BERLIN — Most countries celebrate the best in their pasts. Germany unrelentingly promotes its worst.

The enormous Holocaust memorial that dominates a chunk of central Berlin was completed only after years of debate. But the building of monuments to the Nazi disgrace continues unabated.

On Monday, Germany’s minister of culture, Bernd Neumann, announced that construction could begin in Berlin on two monuments: one near the Reichstag, to the murdered Gypsies, known here as the Sinti and the Roma; and another not far from the Brandenburg Gate, to gays and lesbians killed in the Holocaust.

In November Germany broke ground on the long-delayed Topography of Terror center at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters. And in October, a huge new exhibition opened at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. At the Dachau camp, outside Munich, a new visitor center is set to open this summer. The city of Erfurt is planning a museum dedicated to the crematoriums. There are currently two exhibitions about the role of the German railways in delivering millions to their deaths.

Wednesday is the 75th anniversary of the day Hitler and the Nazi Party took power in Germany, and the occasion has prompted a new round of soul-searching.

“Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame?” asked Avi Primor, the former Israeli ambassador to Germany, at an event in Erfurt on Friday commemorating the Holocaust and the liberation of Auschwitz. “Only the Germans had the bravery and the humility.”

It is not just in edifices and exhibits that the effort to come to terms with this history marches on. The Federal Crime Office last year began investigating itself, trying to shine a light on the Nazi past of its founders after the end of the war. And this month Germany’s federal prosecutor overturned the guilty verdict of Marinus van der Lubbe, the Communist Dutchman executed on charges of setting the Reichstag fire; that event’s 75th anniversary is Feb. 27.

The experience of Nazism is alive in contemporary public debates over subjects as varied as German troops in Afghanistan, the nation’s low birthrate and the country’s dealings with foreigners. Why Germany seems unendingly obsessed with Nazism is itself a subject of perpetual debate here, ranging from the nation’s philosophical temperament, to simple awe at the unprecedented combination of organization and brutality, to the sense that the crime was so great that it spread like a blot over the entire culture.

Whatever the reasons, as the events become more remote, less personal, this society is forced to confront the question of how it should enshrine its crimes and transgressions over the longer term.

In the decades after the war, the central question was how Hitler ever came to power, Horst Möller, director of the Institute of Contemporary History, said in an interview. Even an American television mini-series called “Holocaust” in the 1970s affected the debate in what was then West Germany, shifting the focus more onto the suffering of the victims themselves, Mr. Möller recalled.

Rüdiger Nemitz first began welcoming back Berlin’s exiled victims of Nazi tyranny, an overwhelming majority of them Jews, in 1969. Berlin flies its former citizens back for a week of visits, all expenses paid and complete with a reception by the mayor.

The Invitation Program for Former Persecuted Citizens of Berlin, which has brought roughly 33,000 people for visits to the city, once had 12 full-time staff members. Now it is just Mr. Nemitz and a half-time employee.

The program is not, however, winding down because of waning support. At a time when the Berlin city government has had to make deep cutbacks in other areas, Mr. Nemitz said, the program’s $800,000 budget has not been pared since at least 2000.

“When it started, they were grown-ups,” said Mr. Nemitz from his office on the ground floor of City Hall. “Now, it’s people with hardly any memory of Berlin. Those who come today were children then.” The visits will end in 2010 or 2011, Mr. Nemitz estimated, because there are so few victims left.

Overlooked next to the fact of the survivors’ dying out is that Mr. Nemitz’s generation, those who fought to break the silence of their parents and teachers, is starting to retire. When the last tour group leaves Berlin, Mr. Nemitz, 61, who says he is afraid to take vacations and treats his position more like a mission than a job, will shut the door to his office and retire.

Some say that young Germans, who are required to study the Nazi era and the Holocaust intensively, have shown little indication of letting the theme drop, despite their distance from the events. They say that the younger generation has tackled it as a source not of guilt, but of responsibility on the world stage for social justice and pacifism, including opposition to the war in Iraq.

Others say that the crimes are dealt with only superficially, and that the young will eventually, and perhaps in carefully guarded ways, express their exhaustion with the topic. “I can’t help but feeling that some of the continued, ‘Let’s build monuments; let’s build Jewish museums,’ is a fairly ritualized behavior,” Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, an international public research group, said by telephone. “I worry terribly that it’s going to backfire.”

Germany’s relationship with its Nazi history still regularly generates controversy, as in the case of the dueling train exhibits. The first, Train of Commemoration, is a locomotive carrying displays detailing the way Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust.

The train is making its way through German cities, open for visitors along the way, ultimately bound for the site of the Auschwitz camp, in Poland. Organizers complain that rather than embrace the project, the national railway, Deutsche Bahn, has hindered it, requiring payment for use of the tracks.

The second exhibition, sponsored by Deutsche Bahn itself, opened in Berlin at the Potsdamer Platz train station last week. Critics have derided “Special Trains to Death” as a response to the first exhibition. But Deutsche Bahn’s exhibition does lay out how the company’s predecessor, the Reichsbahn, carried some three million passengers to their deaths; it is filled with painful statistics, photographs and powerful stories of some of the people who perished.

Any failure to handle the history with care grabs national attention. In Munich this past weekend, a traditional carnival season parade overlapped with the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed every year on Jan. 27. The result was a flood of negative publicity for the city.

Stefan Hauf, a spokesman for the city, said, “There was no conscious affront,” adding that the city would have changed the date of the parade, but that too many participants were flying in from other countries to make the change on short notice.

Munich played a special role in Nazi history. It is where the National Socialist party rose to prominence and was the location of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, the failed coup attempt enshrined in Nazi lore. Hitler eventually declared it the Capital of the Movement. Unlike Berlin, which has developed a reputation as a city with a memorial on practically every street corner, Munich has often been criticized for playing down its history.

“Munich was the Capital of the Movement; since 1945 it’s been the capital of forgetting,” said Wolfram P. Kastner, an artist who said he had fought the city over the years for permission to use performance art to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive there.

Munich’s government believes it has been very active in preserving the history of that time. A short walk from the city’s historic Marienplatz, an entire complex of new buildings is devoted to both the city’s Jewish history and the present. The synagogue there opened in November 2006 on the anniversary of the Nazi-led Kristallnacht attacks on Jewish people, businesses and places of worship. The Jewish Museum and a new community center opened in Munich last year.

The city is working on a new museum to be built where the Nazi party headquarters once stood. Called the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, it is expected to open in 2011. The stated goal, according to the museum Web site, “is to create a place of learning for the future.”

To that end, Angelika Baumann of the city’s Department of Arts and Culture has run workshops for schoolchildren 14 to 18 years old. “We’re planning for people who aren’t even born yet,” she said.

Something fundamental has shifted in the Democratic Party.

Last week there was the widespread revulsion at the Clintons’ toxic attempts to ghettoize Barack Obama. In private and occasionally in public, leading Democrats lost patience with the hyperpartisan style of politics — the distortion of facts, the demonizing of foes, the secret admiration for brass-knuckle brawling and the ever-present assumption that it’s necessary to pollute the public sphere to win. All the suppressed suspicions of Clintonian narcissism came back to the fore. Are these people really serving the larger cause of the Democratic Party, or are they using the party as a vehicle for themselves?

And then Monday, something equally astonishing happened. A throng of Kennedys came to the Bender Arena at American University in Washington to endorse Obama. Caroline Kennedy evoked her father. Senator Edward Kennedy’s slightly hunched form carried with it the recent history of the Democratic Party.

The Kennedy endorsements will help among working-class Democrats, Catholics and the millions of Americans who have followed Caroline’s path to maturity. Furthermore, here was Senator Kennedy, the consummate legislative craftsman, vouching for the fact that Obama is ready to be president on Day One.

But the event was striking for another reason, having to do with the confluence of themes and generations. The Kennedys and Obama hit the same contrasts again and again in their speeches: the high road versus the low road; inspiration versus calculation; future versus the past; and most of all, service versus selfishness.

“With Barack Obama, we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion,” Senator Kennedy declared. “With Barack Obama, there is a new national leader who has given America a different kind of campaign — a campaign not just about himself, but about all of us,” he said.

The Clintons started this fight, and in his grand and graceful way, Kennedy returned the volley with added speed.

Kennedy went on to talk about the 1960s. But he didn’t talk much about the late-60s, when Bill and Hillary came to political activism. He talked about the early-60s, and the idealism of the generation that had seen World War II, the idealism of the generation that marched in jacket and ties, the idealism of a generation whose activism was relatively unmarked by drug use and self-indulgence.

Then, in the speech’s most striking passage, he set Bill Clinton afloat on the receding tide of memory. “There was another time,” Kennedy said, “when another young candidate was running for president and challenging America to cross a New Frontier.” But, he continued, another former Democratic president, Harry Truman, said he should have patience. He said he lacked experience. John Kennedy replied: “The world is changing. The old ways will not do!”

The audience at American University roared. It was mostly young people, and to them, the Clintons are as old as the Trumans were in 1960. And in the students’ rapture for Kennedy’s message, you began to see the folding over of generations, the service generation of John and Robert Kennedy united with the service generation of the One Campaign. The grandparents and children united against the parents.

How could the septuagenarian Kennedy cast the younger Clintons into the past? He could do it because he evoked the New Frontier, which again seems fresh. He could do it because he himself has come to live a life of service.

After his callow youth, Kennedy came to realize that life would not give him the chance to be president. But life did ask him to be a senator, and he has embraced that role and served that institution with more distinction than anyone else now living — as any of his colleagues, Republican or Democrat, will tell you. And he could do it because culture really does have rhythms. The respect for institutions that was prevalent during the early ’60s is prevalent with the young again today. The earnest industriousness that was common then is back today. The awareness that we are not self-made individualists, free to be you and me, but emerge as parts of networks, webs and communities; that awareness is back again today.

Sept. 11th really did leave a residue — an unconsummated desire for sacrifice and service. The old Clintonian style of politics clashes with that desire. When Sidney Blumenthal expresses the Clinton creed by telling George Packer of The New Yorker, “It’s not a question of transcending partisanship. It’s a question of fulfilling it,” that clashes with the desire as well.

It’s not clear how far this altered public mood will carry Obama in this election. But there was something important and memorable about the way the 75-year-old Kennedy communed and bonded with a rapturous crowd half a century his junior.

The old guy stole the show.

BOSTON — For a city with an inveterate inferiority complex, Boston has been feeling awfully superior lately.

The Red Sox just won a second World Series in four years after an 86-season drought that traumatized generations of New Englanders. The Patriots, already winners of three Super Bowls this decade, are storming into Sunday’s game an unprecedented 18-0. And the Celtics, only months after being accused of trying to finish with the N.B.A.’s worst record, have the league’s top mark at 34-8.

All this winning raises the question: what has Boston lost? If not games — since Oct. 16, those three New England teams have won 87 percent of the time — then perhaps a certain identity the region must now reconsider. Wearing a Red Sox cap or a Patriots jersey no longer identifies citizens as connoisseurs of pain, lovable Charlie Browns to New York’s success-swiping Lucy. Boston’s little garage bands have made it big, and the victory parades are crowded with bandwagons.

“There’s an embarrassment of riches, all these championships; we’re terribly spoiled,” said Chris Greeley, a government-affairs consultant in Boston and who was once a former chief of staff for Senator John Kerry. “Being the underdog was something Boston always liked. It was easier, and it was good for banding together. But now we don’t have a great enemy to point to — New York, we’ve become them.”

Marty Meehan, the chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Lowell who was a former United States Congressman, added: “I have an 8-year-old and a 5-year-old. I wonder if they’re ever going to know what it was really like here for all those decades.”

No city, let alone Boston, has ever fielded a threesome in the most popular national team sports as dominant as the current Patriots, Red Sox and Celtics. The closest — fittingly — was New York from 1969 through 1970, when the Jets won Super Bowl III, the Mets won the 1969 World Series and the Knicks won the 1970 basketball title. But New York had multiple baseball and football teams, which Boston does not. That inspired Carl Morris, a statistics professor across the Charles River at Harvard, to calculate the chances of a monofranchised city having the three best teams in one year: about 1 in 29,000.

“I’m not sure if people here realize how unlikely this thing really is,” Morris said. “No city is ever going to see anything like this again.”

New York celebrated its 1969-70 sports success with a decade of bankruptcy and rampant crime; Boston’s future appears rosier. Paul Guzzi, president of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, described the economic impact of the region’s sports success as modest, citing added tourism and spending during World Series games, and impact of the Patriots’ new stadium/mall complex in Foxborough.

Terry Francona, the Red Sox manager for both recent World Series titles, said the benefits of winning were probably more spiritual. Francona grew up outside Pittsburgh in the 1970s, and watched the Steelers and the Pirates win championships in 1979.

“The steel mills were shutting down, and Pittsburgh was going to have to change its identity,” Francona recalled. “People were walking around town wearing the black and gold with pride. Winning made people feel better about themselves.”

If Bostonians are feeling sunnier, they do not always show it at the Harp, a watering hole down the street from the TD Banknorth Garden. Katie McAuliffe has tended bar there for six years and she laughed as she considered the difference in fan outlook. “They’re a lot more bold than they used to be,” she said. “They like to break things more now. I think it’s pent-up frustration — like they don’t know how to handle this.”

Indeed, success can demand some emotional recalibration. Sports columnists for The Boston Globe, who for decades could charitably be described as dyspeptic, now must scrounge for material. And even Champagne loses its allure in six-packs.

“When the Red Sox finally won in 2004, the city just went bananas; it was the greatest bachelor party ever,” said Mark Sternman, a researcher for a state government agency, adding that, “2007 was the best party you could have as a married man.”

The Celtics, of course, spent the 1960s as one of sport’s great dynasties, and became dreadful only recently. (Last spring, the team was accused of losing games on purpose so it could finish with the N.B.A.’s worst record and increase its chances of landing the No. 1 or 2 pick in the draft. The Celtics botched that, too.) The Red Sox have been traditionally competitive, just not good enough to outlast the hated Yankees.

The Patriots’ history has been the most pathetic. Beyond frequent 3-13 seasons, their first true home, Schaefer Stadium, opened in 1971 with massive toilet overflows and barely improved thereafter.

Meehan has been a fan through it all. He has held season tickets since 1984, and he said that winning had changed the Patriots fans’ experience. “There are times when you want fans to get up and remind the team that this is a home game,” he said.

Greeley said that Boston fans today expect more of their teams but less of their players. His father once caught a foul ball off the bat of Ted Williams, but threw it back because he, and most of New England, disapproved of Williams’s sulking and apparent selfishness. Fast-forward to today, when the slugger Manny Ramírez is generally shaky on the field and quite flighty off it, but is beloved for this (and his .300 average).

“Manny would never have gotten away with being Manny 40 years ago,” Greeley said. “Nowadays there’s such emphasis on performance. There’s a whole generation that’s growing up now with so much focus on the winning that they may never appreciate the play and the artistry itself. They’re not being trained to appreciate it.”

At Sully’s Tap, not far from the Harp, Jon Megas-Russell did not agree as he nursed a beer at the weathered counter. A devout Boston sports fan and Celtics season-ticket holder, he said that old, rumpled Fenway Park was better than ever thanks to recent renovations (although some complain that rampant advertising has left the Green Monster looking like a Nascar entry). Also worth it, he said, was having to coexist with frivolous front-runners who jump in the marathon only at the end.

“You don’t lose anything by winning, you only add on,” said Megas-Russell, 25, a sales manager from suburban Somerville. “When they win, it validates what you’ve been doing. It puts the city in the limelight in America. People look at the Pilgrims, but we’ve been in the back seat to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. This brings us back.”

He added: “A true fan takes it when it’s good and takes it when it’s bad. When Tom Brady retires, the Patriots won’t be as good. You have to live in the moment.”

Boston’s moments, for most of the last century, ended in heartbreak — none more poignant than Bill Buckner’s grounder between the legs against the Mets in 1986. The New Yorker writer Roger Angell encapsulated New England’s perpetual and divine grief in a palindrome: “Not so, Boston.”

Yet as the Patriots enter Sunday’s Super Bowl as heavy favorites — over the New York Giants, naturally — to win the city’s sixth championship in seven years, “Not so, Boston” seems as outdated as those Pilgrims. Backward is forward, and Boston is first.

By the time Eli Manning was able to throw a tight spiral, his father Archie’s long drives were confined to America’s highways, the elder Manning’s station as the singular quarterback of the subpar New Orleans Saints winning him a long and lucrative second career as a public speaker.

One day last week in Orlando, Fla., where he was delivering an address that had been arranged months earlier, Archie spoke on his cellphone of the strong parental bond that shaped Manning, the Giants quarterback who is following up his older brother Peyton’s appearance in last year’s Super Bowl.

“Eli and Olivia are certainly very close,” Archie said, referring to his wife and Manning’s mother. “They have that special bond that you see between mamas and their baby boys.”

Manning, who turned 27 this month, is nearly five years younger than Peyton, who guided the Colts to a victory over the Chicago Bears in Super Bowl XLI in Miami. He was born almost seven years after Archie and Olivia’s firstborn, Cooper, whose football career was cut short by a chronic spinal condition that required surgery.

In 1982, Archie was traded to the Houston Oilers from the Saints. He played in Houston and in Minnesota before retiring from football in 1984 after 14 seasons.

Because he was only 3 years old when his father retired, Manning has fewer memories of Archie’s playing days than his brothers. They remember accompanying their dad to practices, getting their own healthy ankles taped by the team trainers and being shoulder to shoulder with N.F.L. behemoths in the whirlpool.

Archie did a fair amount of traveling while Manning was growing up, although he arranged his schedule so he could spend as much time with his sons as possible. Even when Archie was away, as long as Eli’s voluble and kinetic older brothers were around, the family’s house in the Garden District of New Orleans was full of life.

Cooper, 33, was a loud and animated child, the family’s natural-born entertainer. Growing up, he and Peyton, 31, were fiercely competitive, the dining room table becoming another battlefield for their sibling rivalry. Eli was more reserved, like his mother. They would sit largely silent at mealtime, digesting the conversation along with their meals.

“I was always kind of the quiet one, the shy one,” Manning said in a phone interview Saturday after practice, the Giants’ last one in New Jersey before leaving Monday for Phoenix and a date in Super Bowl XLII with the undefeated New England Patriots. “Sitting around the dinner table, Cooper kind of ran the conversation. He and Peyton and my dad were the ones who carried the conversation. Mom and I never got to do a whole lot of talking.”

Olivia, who turned down an interview request out of a desire to remain in the background, ran the household the way Manning runs the Giants’ offense: with quiet authority.

“Growing up,” he said, “we would have been lost and clueless without her. She ran the household and was our biggest supporter.”

Manning grew up in the very long shadow cast by his celebrated father and high-achieving brothers. At the same time, he had the luxury of living a life more akin to an only child starting in the eighth grade, when Peyton left for college.

“We had Eli kind of alone for five years,” Archie said.

It was during high school, Manning said, that he grew especially close to his mother. With Archie away part of most weeks, Manning and Olivia began a ritual of eating dinner out once a week, just the two of them. They had a regular rotation of restaurants: Casamentos for oyster poor boys; Figaro’s for pizza; Joey K’s for creole cooking and catfish.

Between mouthfuls, Manning and his mother shared tidbits of their lives. She grew up in Mississippi and met Archie at Ole Miss, where he was the star quarterback and she was a cheerleader and homecoming queen.

“I got to know more about her,” he said. “She told stories about growing up or about college.” Freed from having to compete with his brothers to be heard, Manning also found his voice. “It kind of helped me get my stories out,” he said.

It was not the first time Manning and his mother had bonded over stories. Long before he learned to read defenses, Manning struggled to decipher Dr. Seuss. “I had trouble reading,” he said.

The inadequacy he felt drove him deeper into his shell. “As a child, it’s embarrassing and frustrating,” Manning said. “They call on students to read out loud in class and it’s one of those deals where you’re praying the whole time that they don’t call on you.”

His mother, he said, was influential in helping him improve his reading so he would not have to repeat first grade. “She worked with me and stayed patient,” Manning said. “Her laid-back attitude and her soft Southern drawl helped me keep calm about it. She’s the one who kept telling me it would all work out and it did.”

Years later, with his reading struggles well behind him, Manning posted a score of 39 out of 50 on the Wonderlic, the intelligence test administered by N.F.L. teams to evaluate draft prospects. It was 11 points higher than Peyton’s score and well above the average.

Manning was dragged to so many of his brothers’ athletic events as a child that Archie thought it might turn him off from sports. Some weekends, Archie would take the older boys to their games and Manning said he would ask if he could stay home with a baby sitter. When that was not possible, he would go shopping with his mom for antiques — anything to avoid sitting through four or five basketball games in a day.

“The first couple of times it wasn’t because I wanted to,” Manning said. “It was just because she wanted to go shopping and there was nobody to watch me, so I had to tag along. But after I went a couple of times, I started to enjoy it.”

Over the years, the antique shops on Magazine Street in New Orleans became as familiar to Manning as his childhood home. He returned to them for pieces to decorate his college apartment at Ole Miss, as well as the apartment in Hoboken, N.J., where he lives during the football season. It is a hobby he has passed on to his fiancée, Abby McGrew, who now joins him when he browses for antiques during the off-season. “Some of Eli’s interests favor Olivia’s more than others,” Archie said, adding, “I’ve always felt my wife had class and a lot more culture than I do, and I’ve seen that rub off on Eli.”

In the playoffs earlier this month, Peyton’s Colts played host to the San Diego Chargers on the same day that Manning’s Giants traveled to Dallas to take on the Cowboys. Archie flew to Indiana and watched Peyton’s team lose to the Chargers. Olivia was in Texas to see Manning outduel Tony Romo in the Giants’ upset victory.

The following week, both parents were in a suite in Green Bay for the National Football Conference title game between the Giants and the Packers. In the waning minutes of the fourth quarter, with the score tied, the television cameras caught Archie with his head buried in his hands.

“For 90 percent of the game I was actually very calm,” he said. “Then, in those last few minutes, something hit me.” He was transported back to his days as a player, to those games when his team played better than its opponent but a bad break here or there cost it a victory. “It seemed like that was what was happening to the Giants,” he said, “and it was hard for me to watch.”

Olivia remained calm, of course. As did her youngest son, who marched the Giants into scoring position twice in the fourth quarter, only to have the team’s kicker, Lawrence Tynes, miss both field-goal attempts. After Tynes made a 47-yarder in overtime to send the Giants to the Super Bowl, Manning came out of the locker room, still dressed in his uniform, and locked eyes with his mom.

“It’s good to see you smiling, honey,” she told him.

Manning was happy, for himself and everybody who stuck by him, starting with his mother. “She had just as much relief,” he said, “as I did.”

SHANGHAI — Severe snowstorms over broad swaths of eastern and central China have wreaked havoc on traffic throughout the country, creating gigantic passenger backups, spawning accidents and leaving at least 24 people dead, according to state news reports.

In many areas, where snow has continued falling for several days, the accumulation has been described as the heaviest in as many as five decades. The impact of the severe weather was complicated by the timing of the storms, which arrived just before the Lunar New Year, or Spring Festival, when Chinese return to their family homes by the hundreds of millions.

On Monday, the government announced a severe weather warning for the days ahead, as forecasts suggested that the snowfall would continue in many areas, including Shanghai, which is unaccustomed to severe winter weather.

“Due to the rain, snow and frost, plus increased winter use of coal and electricity and the peak travel season, the job of ensuring coal, electricity and oil supplies and adequate transportation has become quite severe,” Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said in a statement issued late Sunday.

“More heavy snow is expected,” Mr. Wen warned. “All government departments must prepare for this increasingly grim situation and urgently take action.”

The Ministry of Civil Affairs estimates the direct economic cost of the weather so far to be $3.2 billion and the number of people affected to be 78 million, including 827,000 emergency evacuees.

The country’s transportation problems have been deepened by power brownouts in about half of the 31 provinces. Officials said Monday that the supply of coal for electricity had dropped to 21 million tons, less than half the normal levels at this time of year. As a result, 17 provinces were rationing power by Monday.

The coal supply problems were themselves brought on by the heavy snow, sleet and freezing rain, which caused delays in distribution of the fuel by rail and truck in many regions. China is heavily dependent on domestically produced coal for power.

In Guangzhou, the booming southern industrial city, authorities said they expected as many as 600,000 train passengers to be stranded there by Monday. The police were being deployed around the city’s central railroad station as a precaution to keep order.

Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong Province, home to millions of migrant laborers from faraway parts of the country lured by the prospect of jobs in assembly plants and other factories. State television showed scenes of would-be travelers milling about the train station, many of them migrants, and warned that food and sanitation facilities were inadequate.

A power failure on Saturday night in Hunan Province was blamed for many of the rail delays, stranding 136 electric trains, scores serving the north-south Beijing-Guangzhou route.

According to Xinhua, the government news agency, about 100 diesel locomotives were sent to help restore the stranded trains to service. Railroad authorities also said that large quantities of rice and meat, as well as 20,000 boxes of instant noodles, had been rushed to the paralyzed trains to feed passengers.

To cope with the crisis, authorities in Guangzhou have ordered a temporary halt to the sale of train tickets and urged migrants from other provinces to spend the Spring Festival in Guangdong Province. At the earliest, normal train service is not expected to resume for three to five days.

Air travel in the country has also been affected, with at least 19 major airports closed Monday and flight schedules severely disrupted at dozens of other airports because of the snowfall. About 10,000 passengers were stranded at Baiyun Airport in Guangzhou after 55 flights were canceled.

For the stranded passengers, there are few alternatives. Long-distance bus travel has also been severely hampered by icy roads and overwhelmed by the huge numbers of passengers.

For safety reasons, Jiangxi Province has halted all provincial bus service. In Jiangsu Province road networks are reportedly all but paralyzed by the heavy snowfall, while in Anhui Province, authorities have closed all public highways as a safety precaution.

What is Magna Carta worth? Exactly $21,321,000. We know because that’s what it fetched in a fair public auction at Sotheby’s in New York just before Christmas. Twenty-one million is, by far, the most ever paid for a page of text, and therein lies a paradox: Information is now cheaper than ever and also more expensive.

Mostly, of course, information is practically free, easier to store and faster to spread than our parents imagined possible. In one way, Magna Carta is already yours for the asking: you can read it any time, at the touch of a button. It has been preserved, photographically and digitally, in countless copies with no evident physical reality, which will nonetheless last as long as our civilization. In another way, Magna Carta is a 15-by-17-inch piece of parchment, fragile and scarce and practically unreadable. Why should that version be so valuable?

Magna Carta itself is a nice reminder of how costly it once was to store and spread information. Its very purpose was to get the king’s word down in tangible form, safeguard it, enshrine it and then get it out to the countryside. In 13th-century England this required the soaking, stretching, scraping and drying of sheepskin to make vellum, the preparation of ink from oak galls and painstaking penmanship by professional quill-wielding scribes. Then copies had to be made the same way — there was no other — for dispatch to county seats and churches, where they were read aloud.

At that point the value of Magna Carta resided in its words: their meaning and their very real political force, beginning with King John’s greetings in 1215 to “his archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, justices, foresters, sheriffs, stewards, servants and to all his officials and loyal subjects” and continuing with a message never before heard — a setting of limits on the power of the state. It made a grant of rights and liberties to all free men, irrevocably and forever, at least in theory. The document didn’t just express that grant or represent it or certify it. The document was the grant — “given by our hand in the meadow that is called Runnymede.”

The value of the particular item sold at Sotheby’s eight centuries later is entirely different. It’s a kind of illusion. We can call it magical value as opposed to meaningful value. It’s like the value acquired by one baseball when Bobby Thomson batted it out of the Polo Grounds. A physical object becomes desirable, precious, almost holy, by common consensus, on account of a history — a story — that is attached to it. (If it turns out you’ve got the wrong baseball, the value vanishes just as magically.)

The $21 million Magna Carta is actually a copy, made in 1297. In fact, it is surely a copy of a copy, with errors and emendations introduced along the way. And yet it is also an original: issued officially and afresh in the name of King Edward I. Sotheby’s reckons that 17 “original exemplars” from the 13th century survive today, most preserved in England’s libraries and cathedrals. Hundreds more have been lost — to rats, fire and reuse as scrap paper.

Even as a copy, it’s one of a kind. “It was like someone said ‘Mona Lisa,’ ” explained the previous purchaser (Ross Perot, 1984, $1.5 million). In advance of the sale, Sotheby’s called Magna Carta “a lamp in the darkness, a glowing talisman of our human condition, a sacred icon of our human history.” Just so. It’s magic. Religious relics, like the Shroud of Turin, gleam invisibly with the same magic. On a smaller scale so do autographs, coins, rare photographs, Stradivari violins (unless you think you can recognize the tonal quality of 300-year-old wood) and clothing off the backs of celebrities, like the spare wedding dress (ivory silk taffeta) that Diana might have worn but didn’t (2005, $175,000).

All these artifacts share the quality that Philip K. Dick, in his 1962 novel “The Man in the High Castle,” calls historicity, which is “when a thing has history in it.” In the book, a dealer in antiquities holds up two identical Zippo lighters, one of which supposedly belonged to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and says: “One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object has ever had. And one has nothing. Can you feel it? … You can’t. You can’t tell which is which. There’s no ‘mystical plasmic presence,’ no ‘aura’ around it.”

Back in the real world, in 1996, Sotheby’s sold a humidor that had belonged to John F. Kennedy for $574,500. It had historicity.

Of course, more people can afford rarities — rarities are a bigger business than ever — now that being a billionaire doesn’t even guarantee a spot in the Forbes 400. Magna Carta’s buyer, David M. Rubenstein, a founder of the Carlyle Group, was No. 165 last year with a reported fortune of $2.5 billion. He plans to return the document to public view at the National Archives, which has had it on display, along with other iconic texts like the Emancipation Proclamation, the Marshall Plan and the Apollo 11 flight plan.

But the growth in the ranks of the superrich does not explain the hypertrophy in magical value. Just when digital reproduction makes it possible to create a “Rembrandt” good enough to fool the eye, the “real” Rembrandt becomes more expensive than ever. Why? Because the same free flow that makes information cheap and reproducible helps us treasure the sight of information that is not. A story gains power from its attachment, however tenuous, to a physical object. The object gains power from the story. The abstract version may flash by on a screen, but the worn parchment and the fading ink make us pause. The extreme of scarcity is intensified by the extreme of ubiquity.

Stock markets plunged on Thursday as investors confronted a troubling manufacturing report and new indications of the depth of subprime losses and housing woes. The Dow Jones industrial average lost more than 300 points.

The Standard and Poor’s 500-stock index, a broad measure of the financial markets, tumbled below its low for last year, set in March. At the close, it was down 2.9 percent after giving up early morning gains, bringing its decline since Jan. 1 to 9.2 percent.

The Dow Jones industrial average ended down 306.95 points, or 2.5 percent, at 12,159.21, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index was off 2 percent.

A dismal report on manufacturing activity caught investors by surprise on Thursday morning, sending the main indexes into the red after an early stint in positive territory.

The Federal Reserve reported that a survey of Philadelphia-area manufacturers contracted much more than expected. A similar drop in the index occurred in early 2001, just before the onset of the last recession.

“Basically every day now, you have more and more investors leaning toward the camp that yes, this is going to be a recession, and it could be a severe one,” said David Kovacs, a quantitative investment strategist at Turner Investment Partners in Berwyn, Pa.

Recession fears have been roiling the market of late, sending the S.& P. down 8 percent since the beginning of the year.

In testimony in Washington on Thursday, Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, reiterated recent warnings about an imminent drop-off in consumer spending. Mr. Bernanke also hinted that the Fed would lower interest rates, perhaps by half a point, at its meeting later this month, saying that the central bank would “stand ready to take substantive additional action as needed to support growth.”

Investors usually react favorably to evidence of a rate cut, but they appeared unimpressed by Mr. Bernanke’s promise to support a fiscal stimulus package to prop up the ailing economy.

“By the time they actually pass anything, it will be past the time we need it,” said James Paulsen, a strategist at Wells Capital Management, who echoed some of the skepticism on Wall Street about the plan.

Other analysts said the chairman was leaning on the government in lieu of aggressively cutting rates. “The market is frustrated with Bernanke,” Mr. Kovacs said. “Bernanke said it would be nice to have an economic stimulus package to help him with his fight. You didn’t see Greenspan asking for help.”

Regardless of where that help comes from, investors agree that the economy could use a shot of adrenaline. Anxieties were stoked again on Thursday by the release of yet another round of bad data on the housing industry. Groundbreakings for new homes fell last month to their slowest pace in 16 years, the government said, and economists expect the market to soften well into the middle of this year.

Meanwhile, traders were reminded that the fallout from last year’s subprime collapse is still spreading. Merrill Lynch, which ousted its chief executive in the wake of substantial losses from the troubled mortgage market, reported a $9.8 billion loss for the fourth quarter, the worst performance in company history.

The news came on the back of similar write-downs at Citigroup, which was also badly hurt by bad bets on soured mortgage-backed securities. Investors are worried that Wall Street write-downs will make banks less willing to lend, a trend that would cut off a primary source of lifeblood for the economy.

“It’s compounding investors’ fears about how widespread the losses really are,” said Hayes Miller, an analyst at Baring Asset Management in Boston.

Still, some analysts said that jaded investors may have been unfazed by Merrill’s loss, which reiterated much of what market watchers already know about problems at the big Wall Street banks. The poor housing report may have been met by a similarly sleepy reaction, analysts said, who noted that too much bad news can sometimes leave investors numb.

Crude oil slipped 71 cents, settling at $90.13 a barrel, in trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite to its price, ticked down slightly.

The euro was up slightly against the dollar, and the price of gold fell after several days of gains.

As long-time “From the Desk…” readers are no doubt aware, I spent the first ten years out of college working on Broadway as an arranger and conductor, killing time while trying to make my way as a composer/lyricist. Those days are long gone now, but from time to time, I still scratch my songwriting itch by writing new words to old melodies.

This week, I’m at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. At a gathering of user-group members on Monday, I tried out a new song parody. It was inspired by a comment somebody made about how electronics and the Internet are now completely meshed into the fabric of our society. What would it be like if it all went away?

Grab your piano and sing along!

Imagine (sung to the tune of John Lennon’s “Imagine”)

Imagine there’s no Apple,
No products that begin with “i,”
No monthly iPod models,
No Apple stores to get you high.
Imagine all the people
Finding other things to do!

Imagine there’s no bloggers…
It isn’t hard to do!
No viruses or spyware,
No weekly Windows patches, too
Imagine all the people
Learning to get a life…

(You-hoo-hoo!)

You may say it’d be a nightmare
Without Google, Mac or Dell
We might have real conversations–
But the world would be dull as hell!

Imagine no new cellphones;
Kiss console games goodbye.
No David Pogue or Mossberg
To tell us what to buy.
Imagine all the people
Getting some exercise!

(You-hoo-hoo!)

You may say that I’m a loony
But rest assured I’m almost done.
I’m pretty sure it’ll never happen
So we nerds can live as one!

With the possible exception of “the dog ate my homework,” there is no handier excuse for human misbehavior than the midlife crisis.

Popularly viewed as a unique developmental birthright of the human species, it supposedly strikes when most of us have finally figured ourselves out — only to discover that we have lost our youth and mortality is on the horizon.

No doubt about it, life in the middle ages can be challenging. (Full disclosure: I’m 51.) What with the first signs of physical decline and the questions and doubts about one’s personal and professional accomplishments, it is a wonder that most of us survive.

Not everyone is so lucky; some find themselves seized by a seemingly irresistible impulse to do something dramatic, even foolish. Everything, it appears, is fair game for a midlife crisis: one’s job, spouse, lover — you name it.

I recently heard about a severe case from a patient whose husband of nearly 30 years abruptly told her that he “felt stalled and not self-actualized” and began his search for self-knowledge in the arms of another woman.

It was not that her husband no longer loved her, she said he told her; he just did not find the relationship exciting anymore.

“Maybe it’s a midlife crisis,” she said, then added derisively, “Whatever that is.”

Outraged and curious, she followed him one afternoon and was shocked to discover that her husband’s girlfriend was essentially a younger clone of herself, right down to her haircut and her taste in clothes.

It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to see that her husband wanted to turn back the clock and start over. But this hardly deserves the dignity of a label like “midlife crisis.” It sounds more like a search for novelty and thrill than for self-knowledge.

In fact, the more I learned about her husband, it became clear that he had always been a self-centered guy who fretted about his lost vigor and was acutely sensitive to disappointment. This was a garden-variety case of a middle-aged narcissist grappling with the biggest insult he had ever faced: getting older.

But you have to admit that “I’m having a midlife crisis” sounds a lot better than “I’m a narcissistic jerk having a meltdown.”

Another patient, a 49-year-old man at the pinnacle of his legal career, started an affair with an office colleague. “I love my wife,” he said, “and I don’t know what possessed me.”

It didn’t take long to find out. The first five years of his marriage were exciting. “It was like we were dating all the time,” he recalled wistfully. But once they had a child, he felt an unwelcome sense of drudgery and responsibility creep into his life.

Being middle-aged had nothing to do with his predicament; it was just that it took him 49 years to reach a situation where he had to seriously take account of someone else’s needs, namely those of his baby son. In all likelihood, the same thing would have happened if he had become a father at 25.

Why do we have to label a common reaction of the male species to one of life’s challenges — the boredom of the routine — as a crisis? True, men are generally more novelty-seeking than women, but they certainly can decide what they do with their impulses.

But surely someone has had a genuine midlife crisis. After all, don’t people routinely struggle with questions like “What can I expect from the rest of my life?” or “Is this all there is?”

Of course. But it turns out that only a distinct minority think it constitutes a crisis. In 1999, the MacArthur Foundation study on midlife development surveyed 8,000 Americans ages 25 to 74. While everyone recognized the term “midlife crisis,” only 23 percent of subjects reported having one. And only 8 percent viewed their crisis as something tied to the realization that they were aging; the remaining 15 percent felt the crisis resulted from specific life events. Strikingly, most people also reported an increased sense of well-being and contentment in middle age.

So what keeps the myth of the midlife crisis alive?

The main culprit, I think, is our youth-obsessed culture, which makes a virtue of the relentless pursuit of self-renewal. The news media abound with stories of people who seek to recapture their youth simply by shedding their spouses, quitting their jobs or leaving their families. Who can resist?

Most middle-aged people, it turns out, if we are to believe the definitive survey.

Except, of course, for the few — mainly men, it seems — who find the midlife crisis a socially acceptable shorthand for what you do when you suddenly wake up and discover that you’re not 20 anymore.

IN each of the following pairs, respondents are asked to choose the statement with which they agree more:

a) “I have a natural talent for influencing people”

b) “I am not good at influencing people”

a) “I can read people like a book”

b) “People are sometimes hard to understand”

a) “I am going to be a great person”

b) “I hope I am going to be successful”

These are some of the 40 questions on a popular version of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. It may seem like a just-for-kicks quiz on par with “Which Superhero Are You?” but the test is commonly used by social scientists to measure narcissistic personality traits. (Choosing the first statement in any of the above pairings would be scored as narcissistic.)

Conventional wisdom, supported by academic studies using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, maintains that today’s young people — schooled in the church of self-esteem, vying for spots on reality television, promoting themselves on YouTube — are more narcissistic than their predecessors. Heck, they join Facebook groups like the Association for Justified Narcissism. A study released last year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press dubbed Americans age 18 to 25 as the “Look at Me” generation and reported that this group said that their top goals were fortune and fame.

“Anything we do that’s political always falls flat,” said Ricky Van Veen, 27, a founder and the editor in chief of CollegeHumor.com, a popular and successful Web site. “It doesn’t seem like young people now are into politics as much, especially compared to their parents’ generation. I think that could lend itself to the argument that there is more narcissism and they’re more concerned about themselves, not things going on around them.”

Yet despite exhibiting some signs of self-obsession, young Americans are not more self-absorbed than earlier generations, according to new research challenging the prevailing wisdom.

Some scholars point out that bemoaning the self-involvement of young people is a perennial adult activity. (“The children now love luxury,” Plato wrote 2,400 years ago. “They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”) Others warn that if young people continue to be labeled selfish and narcissistic, they just might live up to that reputation.

“There’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Kali H. Trzesniewski, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Ms. Trzesniewski, along with colleagues at the University of California, Davis, and Michigan State University, will publish research in the journal Psychological Science next month showing there have been very few changes in the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of youth over the last 30 years. In other words, the minute-by-minute Twitter broadcasts of today are the navel-gazing est seminars of 1978.

Ms. Trzesniewski said her study is a response to widely publicized research by Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who along with colleagues has found that narcissism is much more prevalent among people born in the 1980s than in earlier generations. Ms. Twenge’s book title summarizes the research: “Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before” (2006, Free Press).

Ms. Twenge attributed her findings in part to a change in core cultural beliefs that arose when baby-boom parents and educators fixated on instilling self-esteem in children beginning in the ’70s. “We think feeling good about yourself is very, very important,” she said in an interview. “Well, that never used to be the case back in the ’50s and ’60s, when people thought about ‘What do we need to teach young people?’ ” She points to cultural sayings as well — “believe in yourself and anything is possible” and “do what’s right for you.” “All of them are narcissistic,” she said.

“Generation Me” inspired a slew of articles in the popular press with headlines like “It’s all about me,” “Superflagilistic, Extra Egotistic” and “Big Babies: Think the Boomers are self-absorbed? Wait until you meet their kids.”

Ms. Twenge is working on another book with W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, this one tentatively called “The Narcissism Epidemic.”

However, some scholars argue that a spike in selfishness among young people is, like the story of Narcissus, a myth.

“It’s like a cottage industry of putting them down and complaining about them and whining about why they don’t grow up,” said Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a developmental psychologist, referring to young Americans. Mr. Arnett, the author of “Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens through the Twenties” (2004, Oxford University Press), has written a critique of Ms. Twenge’s book, which is to be published in the American Journal of Psychology.

Scholars including Mr. Arnett suggest several reasons why the young may be perceived as having increased narcissistic traits. These include the personal biases of older adults, the lack of nuance in the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, changing social norms, the news media’s emphasis on celebrity, and the rise of social networking sites that encourage egocentricity.

Richard P. Eibach, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, has found that exaggerated beliefs in social decline are widespread — largely because people tend to mistake changes in themselves for changes in the external world. “Our automatic assumption is something real has changed,” Mr. Eibach said. “It takes extra thought to realize that something about your own perspective or the information you’re receiving may have changed.”

Ms. Trzesniewski gave as an example of this bias a scene from the film “Knocked Up,” in which new parents drive their baby home from the hospital at a snail’s pace. The road, of course, is no more or less dangerous than before the couple became mother and father. But once they make that life transition, they perceive the journey as perilous.

Indeed, the transition to parenthood, increased responsibility and physical aging are examples of changes in individuals that tend to be the real sources of people’s perceptions of the moral decline of others, write Mr. Eibach and Lisa K. Libby of Ohio State University in a psychology book chapter exploring the “ideology of the Good Old Days,” to be published by Oxford University Press later this year. (They also report that perceptions of social decline tend to be associated with conservative attitudes.)

Ms. Twenge and Ms. Trzesniewski used the inventory in their studies, though they chose different data sets and had opposite conclusions. Each said their data sets were better than the other’s for a host of reasons — all good, but far too long to list here. Ms. Twenge, who has read Ms. Trzesniewski’s critique, said she stands by her own nationwide analysis and has a comprehensive response, along with another paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Personality. It reads in part, “their critique ultimately strengthens our case that narcissism has risen over the generations among college students.”

Mr. Arnett dismisses tests like the inventory. “They have very limited validity,” he said. “They don’t really get at the complexity of peoples’ personality.” Some of the test choices (“I see myself as a good leader”) “sound like pretty normal personality features,” he said.

Ms. Twenge said she understands that sentiment but that the inventory has consistently proved to be an accurate measure. (She calls it “the boyfriend test.”) “There’s a fair number of personality tests that when you look at them they may seem odd, but what’s important is what they predict,” she said.

Test or no test, Mr. Arnett worries that “youth bashing” has become so common that accomplishments tend to be forgotten, like the fact that young people today have a closer relationship with their parents than existed between children and their parents in the 1960s (“They really understand things from their parents’ perspective,” Mr. Arnett said), or that they popularized the alternative spring break in which a student opts to spend a vacation helping people in a third world country instead of chugging 40s in Cancún.

“It’s the development of a new life stage between adolescence and adulthood,” Mr. Arnett said. “It’s a temporary condition of being self-focused, not a permanent generational characteristic.”

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia

As a Saudi soldier with a gold sword high-stepped in front of him, President Bush walked slowly beside King Abdullah through the shivery gray mist enveloping the kingdom, following the red carpet leading from Air Force One to the airport terminal.

When the two stepped onto the escalator, the president tenderly reached for the king’s hand, in case the older man needed help. He certainly does need help, but not the kind he is prepared to accept.

It took Mr. Bush almost his entire presidency to embrace diplomacy, but now that he’s in the thick of it, or perhaps the thin of it — given his speed-dating approach to statesmanship — he is kissing and holding hands with kings, princes, emirs, sheiks and presidents all over the Arab world and is trying to persuade them that he is not in a monogamous relationship with the Jews.

His message boiled down to: Iran bad, Israel good, Iraq doing better.

Blessed is the peacemaker who comes bearing a $30 billion package of military aid for Israel and a $20 billion package of Humvees and guided bombs for the Arabs.

Like the slick Hollywood guy in “Annie Hall” who has a notion that he wants to turn into a concept and then develop into an idea, W. has resumed his mantra of having a vision that turns into freedom that could develop into global democracy.

W.’s peace train quickly gave way to the warpath, however, with Mr. Bush devoting a good chunk of time to the unfinished war in Iraq and the possibility of a war with Iran.

In meetings with leaders, he privately pooh-poohed the National Intelligence Estimate asserting that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. On Fox News, he openly broke with intelligence analysts, telling Greta Van Susteren about Iran: “I believe they want a weapon, and I believe that they’re trying to gain the know-how as to how to make a weapon under the guise of a civilian nuclear program.”

Less than a week after the president arrived in the Middle East, three violent eruptions — an Israeli raid killing at least 18 Palestinians, 13 of whom were militants; an American Embassy car bombing in Beirut; and a luxury hotel suicide-bombing in Kabul — underscored how Sisyphean a task he has set for himself.

“This is one of the results of the Bush visit,” said Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas leader, as he went to a Gaza hospital to see the body of his son, a militant killed in the battle. “He encouraged the Israelis to kill our people.”

Arab TV offered an uncomfortable juxtaposition: Al Arabiya running the wretched saga of Gaza children suffering from a lack of food and medicine during the Israeli blockade, blending into the wretched excess scenes of W. being festooned with rapper-level bling from royal hosts flush with gazillions from gouging us on oil.

W.’s 11th-hour bid to save his legacy from being a shattered Iraq — even as the Iraqi defense minister admitted that American troops would be needed to help with internal security until at least 2012 and border defense until at least 2018 — recalled MTV’s “Cribs.”

At a dinner last night in the king’s tentlike retreat, where the 8-foot flat-screen TV in the middle of the room flashed Arab news, the president and his advisers Elliott Abrams and Josh Bolten went native, lounging in floor-length, fur-lined robes, as if they were Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif.

In Abu Dhabi, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan gave the president — dubbed “the Wolf of the Desert” by a Kuwaiti poet — a gigantic necklace made of gold, diamonds, rubies and emeralds, so gaudy and cumbersome that even the Secret Service agent carrying it seemed nonplussed. Here in Saudi Arabia, the king draped W. with an emerald-and-ruby necklace that could have come from Ali Baba’s cave.

Time’s Massimo Calabresi described the Kuwaiti emir’s residence where W. dined Friday as “crass class”: “Loud paintings of harems and the ruling Sabah clan hang near Louis XVI enameled clocks and candlesticks in the long hallways.”

In Abu Dhabi, the president made a less-than-rousing speech about democracy while staying in the less-than-democratic Emirates Palace hotel’s basketball-court-size Ruler’s Suite — an honor reserved for royalty and W. and denied to Elton John, who is coming later this month to play the Palace.

The president’s grandiose room included a ballroom, in case Mr. Bush wanted to practice the tribal sword dancing he has been rather sheepishly doing with some of his hosts, something between Zorba and Zorro. The $3 billion, seven-star, 84,114-square-foot pink marble hotel — said to be the most expensive ever built — would make Trump blush. It glistens with 64,000 square feet of 22-carat gold leaf, 1,000 chandeliers, 20,000 roses changed every day, 200 fountains, a dome higher than St. Peter’s, an archway larger than the Arc de Triomphe, a beach with white sand shipped in from Algeria and a private heliport. The rooms, scattered with rose petals, range from $1,598 to $12,251.

Puddle jumping through Arabia, the president saw his share of falcons in little leather hoods — presumably not a Gitmo reference — and Arabian stallions, including one retired stud from Texas — presumably not a W. reference. But there was a distinct dearth of wives and dissidents.

It does not bode well for the president’s ability to push the Israelis and Palestinians that he has done so little to push Musharraf on catching Osama, despite our $10 billion endowment, or the Saudis on women’s rights and human rights, even with the $20 billion arms package.

At a press conference last night, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, was asked what the president and king had discussed about human rights.

“About what?” the prince repeated flatly.

“Human rights,” Condi prompted.

“Human rights?” the stately prince pondered, before shimmying out of the question.

Though W. has made the issue of the progress of women in the Middle East a central part of “the freedom agenda” — he had a roundtable over the weekend with Kuwaiti women on democracy and development — he doesn’t seem bothered that 17 years after his father protected the Saudis when Saddam invaded Kuwait, Saudi women still can’t drive or publicly display hair or skin and still get beheaded and lashed because of archaic laws. Neither does the female secretary of state of the United States.

“It’s not allowed for ladies to use the gym,” the Marriott desk clerk told me, an American woman in an American franchise traveling with an American president.

W. was strangely upbeat throughout the trip — “Dates put you in a good mood, right?” he joked to reporters yesterday, specifying that he meant the fruit — even though back home the Republican candidates were running from him and clinging to Reagan.

The Saudi big shots I talked to were intrigued that W. is now more in the sway of Condi than Bombs Away Cheney. They admire his intention about making peace, even though they’re skeptical that he has the time or competence to do it; and they’re sure that the Israelis need more of a shove than a nudge.

They are also dubious about his attempts to demonize and isolate Iran.

“We don’t need America to dictate our enemies to us, especially when it’s our neighbor,” said an insider at the Saudi royal court. The Saudis invited the Iranian president, I’m-a-Dinner-Jacket, to their hajj pilgrimage last month.

Saudis and Palestinians grumbled that they find it hard to listen to the president’s high-flown paeans to democracy when he only acknowledges his brand of democracy. When Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood won elections, W. sought to undermine them. The results of the elections were certainly troubling, but is democratization supposed to be about outcomes?

They also think W.’s plan cancels itself out. The Israelis don’t have to stop settlements if rockets are coming in from Gaza, and Abbas, the Palestinian president, can’t stop rockets from going out of an area he does not control.

The president who described himself at Galilee as “a pilgrim” makes peace sound as easy as three faiths sharing, when history has shown that the hardest thing on earth is three faiths sharing.

Asked by ABC’s Terry Moran what he was thinking when he stood on the site where Jesus performed miracles at the Sea of Galilee, W. replied: “I reflected on the story in the New Testament about the calm and the rough seas, because it was on those very seas that the Lord was in the boat with the disciples, and they were worried about the waves and the wind, and the sea calmed. That’s what I reflected on: the calm you can find in putting your faith in a higher power.”

Clearly, the man believes in miracles.

A combination of common and minor variations in five regions of DNA can help predict a man’s risk of getting prostate cancer, researchers reported Wednesday.

A company formed by researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine is expected to make the test available in a few months, said Karen Richardson, a Wake Forest spokeswoman. It should cost less than $300.

This is, some medical experts say, a first taste of what is expected to be a revolution in medical prognostication. The results, they agree, are clear. But the question is what happens next. And will patients be helped or harmed? Because the new test — which will analyze DNA in blood or saliva samples and is to be offered by ProActive Genomics — cannot predict which men will get aggressive cancers, it could lead to more screening and unnecessary surgery and complications. But, proponents say, it could also help men decide whether they want aggressive screening in the first place.

The researchers found that about 90 percent of the men in the study had one or more of the gene variants and more than half had two or more. The cancer risk increased as the number of variants rose and increased substantially when men had four or five of the variants.

Men with four or five variants made up only 2 percent of the study population but had a 4.5-fold increased risk of having prostate cancer compared with men who had none of the variants. If the men also had a family history of prostate cancer, their risk was nearly 10 times higher than that of men with none of those risk factors. Less than 1 percent of the population had all the variants and a family history.

The researchers report that nearly half of the cases of prostate cancer among the roughly 5,000 men in the study could be attributed to the five gene regions and a family history, with some men having one or two of the gene variants and others having all five and a family history.

Prostate cancer becomes more common as men age — autopsies of elderly men find that most had prostate cancer, whether they knew it or not. But the men in this study had an average age of about 65, when the disease is less common and more likely to kill.

William B. Isaacs, a professor of urology and oncology at Johns Hopkins University and an author of the new report, said that if research validates what has been found, men may want to get the new genetic test when they are young, 35, say. Those at high risk because of their genetics might then choose to start prostate-cancer screening earlier than the usual age of about 50, using a blood test that looks for proteins secreted by prostate tumors.

“I think that makes sense,” said Dr. Howard Sandler, a professor of radiation oncology at the University of Michigan and a spokesman for the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

But others worry that more frequent testing could exacerbate what is already a major problem: most prostate cancers grow so slowly that they would have been harmless if left alone. But since doctors cannot tell which are dangerous, they treat nearly all that they find. And treatment has serious side effects, including, often, impotence and incontinence. Nonetheless, researchers say, the test is a harbinger of things to come.

“It’s the boutique medicine of the future,” said Dr. Peter C. Albertsen, a surgery professor and prostate cancer specialist at the University of Connecticut. “We can know what diseases we will have to face in the rest of our lives.”

That worries him, as it does Dr. Edward P. Gelmann, deputy director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University. “Technology today enables us to find out a huge amount of information,” Dr. Gelmann said. “But how does the public deal with this information? How does it help them make decisions? And if they make a decision, does that lead to a day, a week, a month, of life saved?”

The study, by scientists at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, the Harvard School of Public Health, and Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, will appear in the Jan. 31 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. It was released online on Wednesday, a journal spokeswoman said, because “it is a very active area of research with a lot of competition.”

Researchers long knew that the disease often runs in families. Though scientists spent years looking for genes, they found none that were reproducibly associated with a marked effect.

With new technology to scan the entire length of a person’s DNA, researchers tried a new approach. They began looking for small variations in tiny DNA regions that were associated with prostate cancer. That resulted in the discovery, by several groups of investigators in Iceland and the United States, of the gene variants, small alterations in gene sequences. Unlike traditional genetic links to disease, the variants are not mutations that destroy a gene’s function. In fact, no one knows what their effect is.

The next step was to ask whether those variants really could predict who had prostate cancer. So Dr. Jianfeng Xu, a professor of epidemiology and cancer biology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, and his colleagues studied a Swedish population of 2,893 men with prostate cancer and 1,781 men who did not have it. That led to their finding that each of the five variants independently predicted prostate cancer risk.

“Each confers a moderate risk,” Dr. Xu said, adding that the effect of having just one of the variants — a 10 or 20 percent increase in a man’s chance of having prostate cancer — was not enough to justify using a single variant for screening. But, he added, because each conferred an independent risk, the risks added up so that the more men had, the greater their risk. Then they found that family history of the cancer added an independent risk. “That was very, very surprising to us,” Dr. Xu said.

The next step, Dr. Isaacs said, is to look in other populations. “We think that can happen almost instantaneously,” he said, explaining how scientists have blood samples and family histories of thousands of men who were tested for prostate cancer.

But some said that if the test leads to more screening, it is not necessarily a good thing. There is already too much prostate-cancer screening, they say, resulting in too much treatment. “To me, it is a nightmare,” Dr. Albertsen said. “We are just feeding off of this cancer phobia.”

What is needed, and what the new test does not provide, is a way to decide which cancers are dangerous and which are not, Dr. Isaacs said. Still, he said the new test could help patients if it was used with caution. “We may be premature with this idea — everyone has a different way of thinking about this — but it should not take five years to know if we are on the right track. All this can happen very rapidly.”

“We have worked with enough families that have a positive family history to know that people are anxious to know their risk of prostate cancer,” he said.

New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick was watching just like everyone else Sunday when the game of the year went up in smoke, when the team regarded as the Patriots’ biggest roadblock to another Super Bowl title was eliminated.

As a bonus for him, on the San Diego sideline in Indianapolis was a most welcome sight for any coach about to face the San Diego Chargers: LaDainian Tomlinson standing there, his knee injured enough to keep him out of the second half of the Chargers’ 28-24 victory over the Colts in an American Football Conference divisional playoff game.

With the defending Super Bowl champion Colts, whose rivalry with the Patriots has colored more than a few postseason games this decade, out of the playoffs, the Patriots will play host to the Chargers next Sunday in the A.F.C. championship game. It figures to be a much less heated game than if the Colts had advanced.

The Patriots found their run defense Saturday night in their divisional game against the Jacksonville Jaguars, holding Fred Taylor and Maurice Jones-Drew to 66 yards combined.

Now the team that least needs a break could receive a gift, a conference championship game against Tomlinson, the N.F.L.’s premier running back, who may be at less than full strength, and against quarterback Philip Rivers, whose knee was banged up enough that he did not play in the Chargers’ final two drives Sunday. There is a chance neither will play.

“Going out on the road and winning in Indianapolis shows what kind of mental toughness they have,” Belichick said Sunday in a conference call. “We know we’re going to have to play our best game of the year. We’ll prepare for everybody. As we saw today, any number of players could be in the game.”

The Chargers and the Patriots have their own checkered history. They played in the divisional round in San Diego last season, and it was the Patriots’ victory that ushered Marty Schottenheimer into unemployment. But that game was also notable for the sour reaction of several Chargers, including Tomlinson, to the Patriots’ celebration on the field. Tomlinson said the Patriots showed no class and indicated he thought they took their cues from their coach.

After the Patriots’ spying scandal early this season, Tomlinson said that they lived by the credo, “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.”

Poking Superman in the chest is never a good idea, and the Patriots quieted Tomlinson in the second week of the season, only days after Belichick and the Patriots were sanctioned for the videotaping incident. The question then was whether the Patriots would be distracted. They have been answering ever since, constructing a 17-0 record as they try to become the second N.F.L. team to complete a perfect season with a Super Bowl title.

The Patriots, playing emotionally in support of Belichick, crushed the Chargers that night, 38-14, but plenty has changed since then. The Chargers’ defense has found itself — just ask the Colts — and San Diego has run off eight consecutive victories to get to the conference championship round.

“We’ll start all over on our preparations with them, almost like it’s a new team,” Belichick said. “That was such a long time ago. I think the most important thing for us to focus on is what the Chargers have done in the last couple of months.”

What they did against the Colts may draw particular attention. The Chargers were able to pass for 312 yards, with Rivers and Billy Volek under center. Toward the end of the season, the Patriots’ secondary had some trouble stopping the best passing games — the Giants‘ Eli Manning had the game of his life in the regular-season finale — and the Patriots struggled to stop David Garrard on Saturday night, allowing him to complete 22 of 33 passes for 278 yards and 2 touchdowns. Garrard’s lone mistake, which was turned into an interception by safety Rodney Harrison, secured the victory for the Patriots.

The Patriots were in the A.F.C. championship game last year, too, which for most franchises would mean a very good season. For the Patriots, though, the loss to the Colts was the impetus for a furious remake of the receiving corps that has lifted the Patriots’ offense into the stratosphere. Now it is the Chargers, mocked in the first half of the season and stunning in the second, who will have to grapple with what the Colts wrought with a shot at the Super Bowl on the line.

“The thing about it now is none of it matters,” Patriots quarterback Tom Brady said Saturday night. “For 17 games, it all comes down to this. We were here last year. I hope we perform better.”

IRVING, Tex. — In the days before their divisional playoff game with the Cowboys, the Giants were leery of raising the ire of their highly favored opponent and undermining their own quiet, underdog status. But they could not help but point out the perceived discrepancy in talent between the teams. The Cowboys had 12 players named to next month’s Pro Bowl. The Giants had one.

“It’s like an all-Pro team versus an all-Joe team,” Giants linebacker Antonio Pierce said Thursday. And he seemed to relish the perception.

Facing a big-name, big-play offense standing 23 yards from the game-deciding touchdown, Pierce and his relatively unsung Giants teammates controlled their playoff fate. Before Pierce stood the likes of quarterback Tony Romo, receiver Terrell Owens, tight end Jason Witten and three Pro Bowl linemen. Behind him stood a secondary without its two starting cornerbacks.

And when the reserve cornerback R. W. McQuarters intercepted Romo’s fourth-down pass in the end zone with nine seconds left, the Giants showed that Dallas might have better players, but the Giants have a better team.

The Giants’ 21-17 victory against the Cowboys on Sunday was the team’s ninth consecutive road victory, and it sends them to Green Bay to play the Packers next Sunday in the National Football Conference championship game. The winner will head to Super Bowl XLII in Glendale, Ariz., on Feb. 3, to play the New England Patriots or the San Diego Chargers.

“Nobody — nobody — picked us to be in the playoffs this year,” John Mara, the Giants co-owner and president, said in the din of the winning locker room. “And certainly nobody picked us to be in the N.F.C. championship game.”

The road winning streak for the Giants, who last lost away from Giants Stadium in the season opener against Dallas, is a single-season N.F.L. record. The Packers beat the Giants at the Meadowlands, 35-13, in the second week of the season.

“They’re not going to face the same team they faced in Week 2,” receiver Amani Toomer said.

Sunday’s victory prolonged an increasingly improbable late-season run for the Giants. With a hardening shell of resiliency, they pieced together three defensive stands in the fourth quarter to quiet the 63,660 in attendance and turn away the Cowboys’ hopes of winning a playoff game for the first time in 11 years.

“What I think you’re seeing is the team concept to the nth degree,” Giants Coach Tom Coughlin said.

Quarterback Eli Manning completed 12 of 18 passes for 163 yards, with two touchdowns, both to Toomer. He did not throw an interception or lose a fumble for the second consecutive game.

“He’s done a great job of taking care of the football and really leading this team,” center Shaun O’Hara said.

The Giants arrived in Texas carrying the ease of a team with higher hopes than expectations. As a 10-6 wild-card entrant, they beat Tampa Bay for their first playoff win in seven years. Manning played with poise and pizazz, and Coughlin’s perpetually uncertain future as the coach was settled.

The vibe was far more conflicted for the Cowboys. They finished 13-3 to claim the conference’s top seed, but they had also not won a playoff game since the 1996 season. They had beaten the Giants twice in the regular season, and also defeated the Packers, their potential conference-title-game opponent. Anything short of the Super Bowl for these Cowboys was considered a disappointment.

Those emotions emptied at game’s end. Owens cried when speaking about Romo, afraid that Romo’s jaunt to Mexico with the singer and actress Jessica Simpson during a bye the week before would be blamed for the loss. In their locker room, tackle Flozell Adams yelled obscenities at a reporter, and many Cowboys declined to talk at all.

“They came out here and just whupped us,” cornerback Terence Newman said. “Thirteen-and-three doesn’t matter. I was 100 percent sure we were going to win this game.”

Last week, most of the focus in the news media and in the meeting rooms of the Giants was on Romo’s vacation and Owens’s injured ankle. In two regular-season meetings, Romo had thrown eight touchdown passes. Owens caught four of them.

But much of the playoff match was hitched to Dallas’s clock-milking running attack featuring Marion Barber III. He gained 129 yards, but only 28 of them in the second half as the Giants’ defense slowly tightened its grip on the game’s outcome.

The Cowboys held the ball for 36 minutes 30 seconds of the 60-minute game clock. From late in the first quarter until more than halfway through the third quarter, the Giants had the ball for 4:21. The Cowboys had it for 23:30.

Still, the Giants fought back to a 14-14 halftime tie, and stopped the Cowboys enough in the third quarter to trail by only 17-14 entering the fourth quarter. McQuarters had a 25-yard punt return that gave the Giants possession at the Dallas 37.

Six plays later, with 13:29 remaining, running back Brandon Jacobs scored from 1 yard out, and the Giants held a 21-17 lead that they scrambled to keep.

“It was the longest 13 minutes of my life,” Toomer said.

It seemed an appropriately tight game between two bitter rivals. The Giants and the Cowboys have met 91 times in the regular season, but Sunday’s game was the first postseason contest between the two.

The Giants scored on the game’s first drive when Manning completed a short pass to Toomer on a curl route. Toomer spun away from two would-be tacklers and ran down the sideline for a 52-yard touchdown play.

The Giants had another promising drive going until stalling at the Cowboys’ 44. Rather than attempt the first down on fourth-and-1, the Giants called for punter Jeff Feagles, who pinned Dallas at its 4.

It began a tortuous span of the first half for the Giants’ defense. On consecutive Dallas drives, sandwiching a five-plays-and-punt effort from the Giants, the Cowboys combined to gain 186 yards on 29 plays, scoring the tying and go-ahead touchdowns.

“I’ve never been that tired before,” Pierce said.

The first was a 96-yard touchdown drive, with Barber gaining 72 yards and carrying the game’s momentum with him. Romo threw a 5-yard touchdown pass to Owens on the first play of the second quarter.

After the Giants punted, the Cowboys embarked on a 20-play, 90-yard drive that exhausted the Giants’ defense and 10:28 of the second quarter. The Cowboys converted all six third downs, and Giants cornerback Corey Webster dropped a Romo pass that hit him in the hands and might have been returned for a touchdown. Instead, the drive ended with Barber’s 1-yard plunge and a 14-7 Dallas lead with 53 seconds left in the half.

The Cowboys seemed ready to steamroll the Giants. Manning, in his latest hero turn, rescued them. Back-to-back passes to Steve Smith pushed the Giants 33 yards, and a personal foul on the Cowboys added another 15. On third-and-10 at the Cowboys’ 23 with 17 seconds left, Manning found tight end Kevin Boss near the right sideline for a 19-yard gain. With seven seconds left, Manning fired a 4-yard touchdown pass to Toomer, who lunged across the goal line.

The 14-14 halftime score was reminiscent of the two regular-season games. The Cowboys led the opener, 17-16, before winning, 45-35. In November, the score was tied, 17-17, before the Cowboys won, 31-20.

Both regular-season games were decided by deep second-half touchdown passes by Romo. In the two games, Romo completed 35 of 52 for 592 yards, with eight touchdowns and two interceptions.

On Sunday, Romo completed 18 of 36 passes for 201 yards and a touchdown. The only interception he threw sent the Giants into the N.F.C. championship game.

There may be only three human activities in which miraculous accomplishment is possible before adulthood: mathematics, music and chess. These are abstract, almost invented realms, closed systems bounded by rules of custom or principle. Here, the child learns, is how elements combine and transform; here are the laws that govern their interactions; and here are the possibilities that emerge as you play with signs, symbols, sounds or pieces. Nothing else need be known or understood — at least at first. A child’s gifts in such realms can seem otherworldly, the achievements effortlessly magical. But as Bobby Fischer‘s death on Thursday might remind us, even abstract gifts can exact a terrible price.

In 1956 Mr. Fischer, at 13, displayed powers that were not only prodigious but also uncanny. A game he played against Donald Byrne, one of the top 10 players in the United States, became known as “the Game of the Century,” so packed was it with brilliance and daring (and Mr. Fischer’s sacrifice of a queen). “I just got good,” he explained — as indeed he did, winning 8 of the 10 United States Championship tournaments held after 1958 and then, of course, in 1972, breaking the long hold that Soviet chess had on the international championship.

“All I want to do, ever,” he said, “is play chess.” And many thought him the best player — ever. Garry Kasparov once said that he imagined Mr. Fischer as a kind of centaur, a human player mythologically combined with the very essence of chess itself.

But of course accompanying Mr. Fischer’s triumphs were signs of something else. His aggressive declarations and grandiose pronouncements were once restricted to his chosen playing field. (“Chess is war over the board. The object is to crush the opponent’s mind.”) Eventually, they grew in scope, evolving into ever more sweeping convictions about the wider world.

After his triumph against Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, he all but abandoned chess, and seemed to replace the idea of a seated challenger pushing pieces on a 64-square board, with that of a demonic Jewish world conspiracy that was (as he said in radio broadcasts from the Philippines) perpetrated by a “filthy, lying bastard people” who kill Christian children (“their blood is used for black-magic ceremonies”) while exploiting that “money-making invention,” the Holocaust.

In this vision the circumscribed rules of chess were overturned, and in their place were imagined esoteric plottings of evil grandmasters. In a 2002 essay in The Atlantic Monthly Rene Chun chronicled Mr. Fischer’s “pathetic endgame.” He was reported to keep a locked suitcase with him, containing pills and home remedies:

“If the Commies come to poison me, I don’t want to make it easy for them,” he said. He had his dental fillings removed, worrying about the secret signals and controlling forces that might be channeled through his jaw. The 9/11 attacks, he said, were “wonderful news.”

What was all this? “I don’t believe in psychology,” Mr. Fischer once said about chess competition. “I believe in good moves.” And yes, without the good moves, he would never have struck the fear in his opponents that he once did. But how did faith in good moves mutate into such perverse psychology? Was there any connection between his gifts in chess and his later delusions?

You might of course speculate that his perceptions were affected by never having seen his father, a physicist named Mr. Fischer, after he was 2. A revealing profile in Harper’s magazine in 1962 indicated that Mr. Fischer’s mother, Regina Wender, also had other preoccupations. Bobby’s sister described her as a “professional crusader.” Bobby had dropped out of high school and was a chess wunderkind with a world reputation, while, at the time of the profile, his mother was spending eight months walking to Moscow in a “pacifist” protest.

A few years ago the Philadelphia Inquirer, obtaining F.B.I. records under the Freedom of Information Act, also found compelling evidence that Bobby Fischer’s father was not the man named on his birth certificate, but a brilliant Hungarian scientist, Paul F. Nemenyi, with whom his mother had an affair. Mr. Nemenyi apparently paid to help support Bobby, and there is even the record of a complaint he made to a social worker about Bobby’s upbringing. If that identification is accurate, the paradoxes of Mr. Fischer’s virulent anti-Semitism become still more profound, since Mr. Nemenyi, like Ms. Wender, was Jewish.

Chess too can seem to encourage a streak of craziness. ( “I like to see ‘em squirm,” Mr. Fischer proclaimed.) But for paranoia and posturing, nothing could come close to the 1972 championship match in Reykjavik. In recent years the argument has been made that the attention given to the confrontation between Mr. Fischer and Mr. Spassky had little to do with the cold war. Mr. Spassky himself was no party-line comrade, and Mr. Fischer, with all his idiosyncrasies, was far from a comfort to the United States State Department; moreover, by 1972, such confrontations no longer had the symbolic power they had during the era of Sputnik. But there is still no question that the contest drew its worldwide audience partly because it presented two conflicting national idols.

Mr. Fischer, with his demands about money, his finickiness about cameras and chairs and schedule, could seem an extreme example of the American individualist, while Mr. Spassky, with his back to the audience, his stone-faced demeanor and the state support for this national game behind him, seemed an incarnation of Soviet ideology. The Soviets also answered Mr. Fischer’s egomaniacal posturing with their own versions of conspiracy mongering, suggesting that Mr. Spassky’s performance was being deliberately sabotaged by American tampering with the players’ environments; the air had to be tested and the chairs X-rayed.

But there is still something about Mr. Fischer’s craziness that is closely connected with the essential nature of chess. The gift of early insight into chess or math or music is often also accompanied by a growing obsession with those activities, simply because of the wonders of connection and invention that unfold in the young mind. The world itself, with its more messy human interactions, its complicated histories, its emotional conflicts, can be put aside, and attention focused on an intricate bounded cosmos.

Perhaps we should be grateful that such gifts are so rare, for if they were not, how many of us would prefer to remain cocooned in these glass-bead games? At least in mathematics and music, we may be grateful too that ultimately, with the coming of maturity, the world starts to put constraints on abstract play. Great music attains its power not simply through manipulation and abstraction, but by creating analogies with experience; music is affected by life, not cut off from it. Mathematics also comes up against the demands of the world, as the field opens up to understanding; early insights are tested against the full scale of what has been already been done and what yet remains undone.

But chess, alone among this abstract triumvirate, is never tested or transformed. The only way expertise is ever tried is in victory or defeat. And if a player is as profoundly powerful as Mr. Fischer, defeat never creates a sense of limits. Seeing into a game and defeating an opponent — that defines the entire world.

So when it comes time to look at the wider world, it might seem a vast extension of the game, only ever so much more frightening because its conspiratorial strategies cannot be discovered in rule books, and its confrontations cannot be controlled by formal tournaments. That was the world that Bobby Fischer saw around him as he morphed from world champion chess player into world-class crank, never realizing that he had unwittingly blundered into checkmate.

Mexico. Brazil. Argentina. Mexico, again. Thailand. Indonesia. Argentina, again.

And now, the United States.

The story has played itself out time and time again over the past 30 years. Global investors, disappointed with the returns they’re getting, search for alternatives. They think they’ve found what they’re looking for in some country or other, and money rushes in.

But eventually it becomes clear that the investment opportunity wasn’t all it seemed to be, and the money rushes out again, with nasty consequences for the former financial favorite. That’s the story of multiple financial crises in Latin America and Asia. And it’s also the story of the U.S. combined housing and credit bubble. These days, we’re playing the role usually assigned to third-world economies.

For reasons I’ll explain later, it’s unlikely that America will experience a recession as severe as that in, say, Argentina. But the origins of our problem are pretty much the same. And understanding those origins also helps us understand where U.S. economic policy went wrong.

The global origins of our current mess were actually laid out by none other than Ben Bernanke, in an influential speech he gave early in 2005, before he was named chairman of the Federal Reserve. Mr. Bernanke asked a good question: “Why is the United States, with the world’s largest economy, borrowing heavily on international capital markets — rather than lending, as would seem more natural?”

His answer was that the main explanation lay not here in America, but abroad. In particular, third world economies, which had been investor favorites for much of the 1990s, were shaken by a series of financial crises beginning in 1997. As a result, they abruptly switched from being destinations for capital to sources of capital, as their governments began accumulating huge precautionary hoards of overseas assets.

The result, said Mr. Bernanke, was a “global saving glut”: lots of money, all dressed up with nowhere to go.

In the end, most of that money went to the United States. Why? Because, said Mr. Bernanke, of the “depth and sophistication of the country’s financial markets.”

All of this was right, except for one thing: U.S. financial markets, it turns out, were characterized less by sophistication than by sophistry, which my dictionary defines as “a deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope of deceiving someone.” E.g., “Repackaging dubious loans into collateralized debt obligations creates a lot of perfectly safe, AAA assets that will never go bad.”

In other words, the United States was not, in fact, uniquely well-suited to make use of the world’s surplus funds. It was, instead, a place where large sums could be and were invested very badly. Directly or indirectly, capital flowing into America from global investors ended up financing a housing-and-credit bubble that has now burst, with painful consequences.

As I said, these consequences probably won’t be as bad as the devastating recessions that racked third-world victims of the same syndrome. The saving grace of America’s situation is that our foreign debts are in our own currency. This means that we won’t have the kind of financial death spiral Argentina experienced, in which a falling peso caused the country’s debts, which were in dollars, to balloon in value relative to domestic assets.

But even without those currency effects, the next year or two could be quite unpleasant.

What should have been done differently? Some critics say that the Fed helped inflate the housing bubble with low interest rates. But those rates were low for a good reason: although the last recession officially ended in November 2001, it was another two years before the U.S. economy began delivering convincing job growth, and the Fed was rightly concerned about the possibility of Japanese-style prolonged economic stagnation.

The real sin, both of the Fed and of the Bush administration, was the failure to exercise adult supervision over markets running wild.

It wasn’t just Alan Greenspan’s unwillingness to admit that there was anything more than a bit of “froth” in housing markets, or his refusal to do anything about subprime abuses. The fact is that as America’s financial system has grown ever more complex, it has also outgrown the framework of banking regulations that used to protect us — yet instead of an attempt to update that framework, all we got were paeans to the wonders of free markets.

Right now, Mr. Bernanke is in crisis-management mode, trying to deal with the mess his predecessor left behind. I don’t have any problems with his testimony yesterday, although I suspect that it’s already too late to prevent a recession.

But let’s hope that when the dust settles a bit, Mr. Bernanke takes the lead in talking about what needs to be done to fix a financial system gone very, very wrong.

My leaving home actually began by going back there, to Greensboro, N.C., from Mount Holyoke College for the summer of 1966. That was when my mother pretty much went off her rocker.

It wasn’t really a surprise. Mother had been intermittently mentally ill for years, but since being crazy was considered unacceptable in our house, her problems hadn’t been dealt with at all. Mother had “issues” with control, with sex, with emotional intimacy, with a brain that produced too much of some chemicals and not enough of others. Her problems ran rampant and unacknowledged through my childhood, as my father was too worn down — or didn’t know how — to intervene.

I was 19 that summer, working as a teacher’s aid in Head Start, trying to finish growing up. For this, it seemed, my lovely, erudite mother raged at me almost nonstop. When she physically attacked my boyfriend, I’d had enough. I took my earnings — 30 bucks in cash, 200 more in my checkbook — and got on the bus to Houston. I wanted a different life, and Houston seemed as different as I could afford.

A Greyhound bus is a honky-tonk on wheels; a rolling principality where the driver may be king, but if you’re quiet the king doesn’t care what you’re up to. Riding one for 36 hours in the mid-’60s was like living the lyrics of a Woody Guthrie song. There I was, Miss Prissy Prep School, with her 30 bucks and her paperback Trollope novel, awash in the smell of fried chicken and dirty diapers and increasingly unwashed people. I stared out the window and watched the South’s underbelly roll by with its shacks and cotton fields, live oaks and bayous. This, finally, was my life.

The 15-year-old boy beside me was on his way to Mississippi for reasons he didn’t want to talk about. Because he hadn’t had the ritualized social dance drilled into him that I’d had drilled in to me, he assumed people sitting next to each other on a bus were friends. And so we were, talking about our short lives as the dingy bus stations came and went.

That boy was the first person I told about my mother. He seemed to think no less of me for either having such a parent or for leaving her behind, but he did insist I phone home from Spartanburg so that my folks — imperfect as they were — wouldn’t worry more than was unavoidable. When I ran short of cash just before he got off the bus, he lent me $10. I wrote down his address and promised to send him the money.

With no seatmate to distract me, I crossed the Mississippi with my nose stuck to the window. It stayed there through Louisiana and beyond, while Trollope lay neglected in my lap. Why read when I could watch East Texas roll by?

Freedom’s just another word for no pretensions left to lose. I got off the bus in Houston at midnight and checked into the cheap hotel across the street. My first job was as a lunch-counter waitress. No one there cared that I spoke French or could discuss “Paradise Lost”; they just wanted their eggs. But before long I was working as a researcher and had my own studio apartment.

It was the ’60s; I considered myself a person of principle and art. I occupied buildings, marched for miles, lost friends to Canada and acquaintances to war, got involved in theater. I fell in love with Texas weather’s lack of civility, with Houston’s swagger, with tall men who wore big hats.

My daughter, Lizzie, was born in Houston. We moved with her father to Charlottesville, Va., when she was 5, and she and I stayed there. While she was growing up I liked to remind her that before she ever saw Mr. Jefferson’s manicured city, she’d been in a hurricane, stared down giant water roaches, slept backstage and protested injustice. I’m happy and proud to say she has grown up unafraid.

Leaving home the way I did didn’t fix either me or my life, but it did teach me I didn’t have to stay somewhere just because the future somewhere else looked murky — something that was good to know when my first two marriages didn’t work. God knows I’ve had plenty of rough patches since then — bouts with addiction and alcoholism, my own rounds with the family disease of depression — but nothing ever made me regret getting on the Houston bus.

I did my best to keep in touch with my parents, and I visited them occasionally. At the end of my mother’s life I was able to take care of her without rancor. By then I suppose I understood we’d both done the best we could. But I put off sending the 10 bucks back to that boy on the Houston bus until I finally lost his address. And that I do regret.

“HAVE YOU SEEN THE ROMANIAN MOVIE?” This somewhat improbable question began to circulate around the midpoint of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. For some reason, the critics, journalists and film-industry hangers-on who gather in Cannes each May to gossip and graze rarely refer to the films they see there by their titles, preferring a shorthand of auteur, genre or country of origin (“the Gus Van Sant“; “the Chinese documentary”; “that Russian thing”). It’s a code that everyone is assumed to know, and in this case there was not much room for confusion. How many Romanian movies could there be?

More than most of us would have predicted as it turned out. But for the moment we were happy to have “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” the second feature by Cristi Puiu, though given the movie’s methods and subject matter there was perhaps something a little perverse in our joy. Its exotic provenance was not the only thing that made Puiu’s movie sound like something only a stereotypical film snob could love. More than two and a half hours long, “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” chronicles the last night in the life of its title character, a flabby 63-year-old Bucharest pensioner with a stomachache and a drinking problem. Filmed in a quasi-documentary style in drab urban locations — a shabby apartment, the inside of an ambulance, a series of fluorescent-bulbed hospital waiting and examination rooms — it follows a narrative arc from morbidity to mortality punctuated by casual, appalling instances of medical malpractice.

And yet viewers who witnessed poor Dante Lazarescu’s unheroic passing on the grand screen of the Salle Debussy emerged from the experience feeling more exhilarated than depressed. “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” is raw, melancholy and unflinching, but it is also lyrical, funny and, perhaps paradoxically, full of life. And though the wobbling camera and the use of unflattering available light create an atmosphere of tough, unadorned naturalism, the film is also, on closer inspection, a remarkably artful piece of work, with a strong, unpredictable story, rigorous camera work and powerfully understated performances. The excitement that greeted it came from the feeling that one of the oldest and strongest capacities of cinema — to capture and illuminate reality, one face, one room, one life at a time — had been renewed.

When the festival was over, Cristi Puiu returned to Bucharest with an award, called Un Certain Regard, given to the best film in a side program that frequently upstages the main competition. The rest of us went home with the glow of discovery that is one reason we go to film festivals in the first place. This is not an especially unusual occurrence on the festival circuit. Every so often, a modest picture from an obscure place makes a big splash in the relatively small international art-film pond. But the triumph of “Mr. Lazarescu” in Cannes turned out to be a sign of things to come. In 2006, the year after “Mr. Lazarescu,” attentive Cannes adventurers would find room in their screening schedules for two new Romanian movies, Catalin Mitulescu’s “Way I Spent the End of the World” and Corneliu Porumboiu‘s “12:08 East of Bucharest,” both of which dealt, albeit in very different ways, with the revolution of 1989. When the time came to hand out awards, Porumboiu won the Caméra d’Or, given to the best debut feature.

A year later, the first film in the Cannes competition to be shown to the press was Cristian Mungiu‘s second feature, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” a harrowing, suspenseful story of illegal abortion and an unsparing portrait of daily life in the last years of Communist rule. By the end of the festival, “the Romanian abortion movie” (its inevitable and somewhat unfortunate shorthand designation) had overpowered a competitive field. There was much delight but no great surprise when Mungiu, a soft-spoken, round-faced 39-year-old, walked onto the stage of the Salle Lumière on the last night of the festival to accept the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize and a token of membership in the world fraternity of cinematic masters (or at least in a diverse club whose other recent inductees include Roman Polanski, Lars von Trier and Michael Moore). Earlier in the day, the Certain Regard jury (one of whose members was Cristi Puiu) gave its award to “California Dreamin’,” yet another Romanian movie whose director, the prodigiously talented Cristian Nemescu, died in a car accident the year before at the age of 27.

In three years, then, four major prizes at the world’s pre-eminent film festival went to movies from a country whose place in the history of 20th-century cinema might charitably be called marginal. The post-Cannes triumphal march of “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” (it opens in New York on Friday) to the tops of English-language critics’ polls and year-end lists, as well as to a Golden Globe nomination, offers belated confirmation of last spring’s news flash from the Côte d’Azur. But perhaps you are hearing it here first: the Romanian new wave has arrived.

IS THERE OR IS THERE NOT?

Such is the consensus, or at least the hype, within the worldwide critical community. In Romania itself, where Mungiu’s Palme d’Or was front-page news and occasioned a burst of national pride (including a medal bestowed on the director by the country’s president), there is a bit more skepticism. The Romanian title of “12:08 East of Bucharest,” the 2006 Caméra d’Or winner, is “Fost sau n-a fost,” which translates as “was there or was there not?” The question is posed by the pompous host of a provincial television talk show to an undistinguished panel (consisting of an alcoholic schoolteacher, a semiretired Santa Claus and a desultory handful of callers) on the 16th anniversary of the revolution that overthrew Nicolae Ceausescu. The moderator wants his guests to address whether or not, in their sad little city in Moldavia (Porumboiu’s hometown of Vaslui), the revolution really happened. A long and inconclusive debate follows, punctuated by verbal digressions and technical difficulties: a production assistant’s hand reaches into the frame; the camera abruptly zooms in on the host’s nose. (“At last, a close-up,” he says). A discussion of contemporary Romanian cinema with Romanian filmmakers and critics can sometimes resemble that scene: “Is there or is there not a Romanian new wave?” Or, as it was put recently, with some irreverence, before a very distinguished panel at a contentious public debate held at the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, “Romanian Cinema: The Golden Age?”

Compared with what? Romanian cinema, it will be pointed out, was not born with “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.” As it happened, Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or arrived punctually on the 50th anniversary of the first Romanian Palme, awarded in 1957 to Ion Popescu-Gopo’s “Short History,” a charming, wordless animated short in which human evolution and industrial development culminate in the planting of large daisylike flowers on distant planets. More to the point, there was a Romanian movie industry in the 1970s and ’80s, and many of the filmmakers whose movies traveled the festival rounds in those days — directors like Stere Gulea, Dan Pita and Mircea Daneliuc — are still active. The younger generation, furthermore, does not necessarily represent a unified or coherent movement.

In an article published last summer in the English-language journal European Alternatives, Alex Leo Serban, one of Romania’s leading film critics, instructed readers to keep in mind that “there are no ‘waves,’ . . . just individuals.” When I met him in Bucharest in November, Puiu, the director of “Mr. Lazarescu,” was more emphatic. “There is not, not, not, not, not a Romanian new wave,” he insisted, hammering the point home against the arm of his living-room couch. Puiu, who studied painting in Switzerland before turning to film, is given to grand, counterintuitive statements. (“I am not a filmmaker!” he practically shouted at me when I asked him, in all innocence, what inspired him to become one.) To spend time with him — as I discovered in the course of a long evening at his apartment, during which several bottles of Romanian wine and countless American cigarettes joined Mr. Lazarescu in the great beyond — is to be drawn into frequent and fascinating argument. Over hors d’oeuvres, we stumbled into a friendly quarrel over the idea that anyone’s life has ever really been changed by a book or a film, and as we ate roast lamb at Puiu’s high, narrow kitchen table we debated whether or not a camera’s zoom could be said to correspond to any activity of the human eye.

When it comes to new waves, the critics who announce (or invent) them have more of an investment than artists, who understandably resist the notion that their individuality might be assimilated into some larger tendency. Ever since the French Nouvelle Vague of the late 1950s and early ’60s, cinephiles have scanned the horizon looking for movement. In Czechoslovakia before 1968, in West Germany and Hollywood in the 1970s and more recently in Taiwan, Iran and Uzbekistan, the metaphor signaled newness, iconoclasm, a casting off of tradition and a rediscovery of latent possibilities. It also contains an implicit threat of obsolescence, since what crests and crashes ashore is also sure to ebb. Which may be one reason for partisans of Romanian cinema to resist the idea of a wave. If no one wins a prize next year in Cannes, will this golden age be over?

But it’s hard, all the same, for an outsider to give full credence to the notion that the current flowering of Romanian film is entirely a matter of happenstance, the serendipitous convergence of a bunch of idiosyncratic talents. For one thing, to watch recent Romanian movies — the features and the shorts, the festival prizewinners and those that might or should have been — is to discover a good deal of continuity and overlap in addition to obvious differences.

Though they might be reluctant to admit it, the new Romanian filmmakers have a lot in common beyond their reliance on a small pool of acting and technical talent. Because of the stylistic elements they share — a penchant for long takes and fixed camera positions; a taste for plain lighting and everyday décor; a preference for stories set amid ordinary life — Puiu, Porumboiu and Mungiu are sometimes described as minimalists or neo-neorealists. But while their work does show some affinity with that of other contemporary European auteurs, like the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who make art out of the grim facts of quotidian existence, the realism of the Romanians has some distinct characteristics of its own.

It seems like something more than coincidence, for example, that the five features that might constitute a mini-canon of 21st-century Romanian cinema — “Stuff and Dough,” Puiu’s first feature; “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu”; “12:08 East of Bucharest”; “The Paper Will Be Blue,” by Radu Muntean; and “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” — all confine their action to a single day and focus on a single action. This is less a matter of Aristotelian discipline than of respect for the contingency and loose-endedness of real experience. In each case, the action is completed — Lazarescu dies; the abortion in “4 Months” is performed; the broadcast in “12:08″ comes to an end — but a lingering, haunting sense of inconclusiveness remains. The narratives have a shape, but they seem less like plots abstracted from life than like segments carved out of its rough rhythms. The characters are often in a state of restless, agitated motion, confused about where they are going and what they will find when they arrive. The camera follows them into ambulances, streetcars, armored vehicles and minivans, communicating with unsettling immediacy their anxiety and disorientation. The viewer is denied the luxury of distance. After a while, you feel you are living inside these movies as much as watching them.

When Otilia, the heroine of “4 Months,” joins a dinner party at her boyfriend’s house, the camera stays across the table from her, putting the audience in the position of a silent, watchful guest. We know she has just been through an unspeakably strange and awful experience, but the others, friends of the boyfriend’s parents, are oblivious, and their banal, posturing wisdom becomes excruciating. The emptiness of authority — whether generational, political or conferred by elevated social status — is an unmistakable theme in the work of nearly all the younger Romanian filmmakers. The doctors who neglect Mr. Lazarescu; the grandiose, small-time television host in “12:08″; the swaggering army commanders and rebel leaders in “The Paper Will Be Blue” and their successors, the officious bureaucrats in “California Dreamin’ ” — all of these men (and they are all men) display a self-importance that is both absurd and malignant. Their hold on power is mitigated sometimes by their own clumsiness but more often by unheralded, stubborn acts of ordinary decency. An ambulance technician decides to help out a suffering old man who is neither kin nor especially kind; a student stands stoically by her irresponsible friend; a militia officer, in the middle of a revolution, goes out of his way to find and protect an errant, idealistic young man under his command.

There is almost no didacticism or point-making in these films, none of whose characters are easily sorted into good guys and bad guys. Instead, there is an almost palpable impulse to tell the truth, to present choices, conflicts and accidents without exaggeration or omission. This is a form of realism, of course, but its motivation seems to be as much ethical as aesthetic, less a matter of verisimilitude than of honesty. There is an unmistakable political dimension to this kind of storytelling, even when the stories themselves seem to have no overt political content. During the Ceausescu era, which ended abruptly, violently and somewhat ambiguously in December 1989 — in the last and least velvety of the revolutions of that year — Romanian public life was dominated by fantasies, delusions and lies. And the filmmakers who were able to work in such conditions resorted, like artists in other communist countries, to various forms of allegory and indirection. Both Puiu and Mungiu describe this earlier mode of Romanian cinema as “metaphorical,” and both utter the word with a heavy inflection of disgust.

“I wanted to become a filmmaker as a reaction to that kind of cinema,” Mungiu told me. “Nothing like this ever happened in real life. And you got this desire to say: ‘People, you don’t know what you’re talking about. This is all fake. This is not what you should be telling in films. I could do way better than you.’ I felt this way, but I think this whole generation had that feeling. Those movies were badly acted, completely unbelievable, with stupid situations, lots of metaphors. It was a time when, you know, saying something about the system was more important than telling a story.”

The new generation finds itself with no shortage of stories to tell, whether about the traumas of the Stalinist past or the confusions of the Euro-consumerist present — and also, for the moment, with an audience eager to hear them.

TALES FROM THE GOLDEN AGE

Or perhaps with several different audiences. “Make sure you pay attention to the words on the screen at the beginning,” Mungiu advised a packed house of moviegoers who had come, six months after Cannes, to see “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.” This was in Silver Spring, Md., at a program of new European movies presented by the American Film Institute. I saw Mungiu in Cannes in May and met him briefly at the New York Film Festival, but as it happened I would be unable to catch him in Bucharest. After his triumphant homecoming and a kind of roadshow Romanian release of “4 Months” over the summer, he had been in a state of frequent-flier exile familiar to successful filmmakers, crisscrossing the globe — with stops in Korea, Berlin, Los Angeles and now the suburbs of Washington — to show his movie.

His opening remarks were meant to direct the audience’s attention to the only part of “4 Months” that provides its story with explicit context, a note in the lower right-hand corner that says, “Romania, 1987.” But for this crowd, it turned out, the explanation was redundant. They knew exactly where they were. Two-thirds of the way through the screening — at a point when the viewer is fully immersed in the helplessness and dread that are the film’s governing emotions — I bumped into Mungiu just outside the theater doors. He appeared to be listening intently to what was going on inside. “I think there are a lot of Romanians here tonight,” he said, looking up. I asked what gave him that impression. “They’re laughing,” he said. “They always do.”

Now, it should be noted that “4 Months” is about as far from a comedy as a movie can be. If you were looking for a generic label, you could do worse than to call it a kind of horror movie, in which the two main characters, young women in jeopardy, are subjected to the sadism of an unscrupulous abortionist and, almost worse, the indifference, hostility and incomprehension of just about everyone else. It is not an easy film to watch, but it feels, to a non-Romanian, like an absolutely convincing anatomy of what ordinary people endured under communism. And it clearly felt that way to the members of the Romanian diaspora as well, except that they found humor in addition to horror in revisiting a familiar bygone world. What followed the screening was less the anticipated Q-and-A session than a trip down memory lane, which spilled out into the theater lobby and continued well into the night. “That was exactly like my dorm room at university,” one woman announced. Another wanted to know how Mungiu found the brands of soap, gum and other items that had been staples of the Ceausescu era. (“You can find anything on the Internet,” he replied.)

Mungiu originally conceived “4 Months,” which is based on something that happened to a woman he knows, as part of a series of “Tales From the Golden Age,” an ironic reference to the way Ceausescu characterized his reign, which began in 1965. Born in 1968, Mungiu calls himself a “child of the decree,” meaning Ceausescu’s 1966 edict restricting abortion and birth control for the purpose of spurring economic development by increasing the Romanian population. Though the law fell short of its demographic goals, it did in its way spawn a handful of new Romanian filmmakers, who reached adolescence and early adulthood just as Ceausescu’s monstrous utopian experiment was collapsing. Puiu was born in 1967. Muntean, whose experience in the military during the 1989 revolution is the basis of “The Paper Will Be Blue,” is four years younger. Corneliu Porumboiu was 14 (and playing table tennis with a friend) when the old regime fell.

Its demise was an anomaly, much as the regime itself was. One especially painful aspect of Romanian communism was that it was, well, Romanian — an indigenous outgrowth at least as much as a foreign imposition. For much of his reign, Ceausescu was admired in the West for his relative independence from Moscow, but internally he fostered a nationalist cult of personality that in some ways had more in common with Kim Il Sung’s North Korea (which Ceausescu came to admire after visiting in the early 1970s) than with desultory bureaucratic police states like Czechoslovakia and East Germany. And perhaps for this reason — because Romanians were not simply throwing off an imperial yoke, but at the same time exorcising a leader who claimed to be the highest incarnation of their identity as a people — the Romanian revolution was by far the most violent in Eastern Europe in 1989. Elsewhere, the imagery of that year consists of hammers chipping at the Berlin Wall and a playwright installed in Prague Castle, but in Romania there are soldiers firing into crowds, torn flags and the summary execution, on Christmas Day, of the dictator and his wife. And the nature of the event is shadowed, to this day, by doubt and irresolution. Was it a popular uprising or a coup d’etat sponsored by an opportunistic faction within the military and the ruling party? Its aftermath — in particular the violent suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations in June 1990 — was nearly as bloody as the revolution itself, and the transition out of communism in the 1990s was marked by economic crisis, political stalemate and social malaise.

It would be an unwarranted generalization for me to claim that Romanians are still preoccupied with this history. I can say, though, that every conversation I had in Bucharest, even the most casual, circled back to the old days, so that I sometimes felt that they ended much more recently than 18 years ago. And the physical aspect of Bucharest confirms this impression. The busy shopping streets have the usual storefronts — Sephora, Hugo Boss, various cellphone carriers and European grocery chains — and the main north-south road out of town is jammed with Land Rovers and lined with big-box discount stores. Turn a corner, though, or glance behind one of the billboards mounted on the walls of old buildings, and you are thrown backward, from the shiny new age of the European Union (which Romania joined only last year) into the rustiest days of the Iron Curtain. The architecture is a jumble of late-19th-century Hapsburg-style villas and gray socialist apartment blocks, some showing signs of renovation, others looking as if they had fallen under the protection of some mad Warsaw Pact preservation society.

This layering of the old and the new was perhaps most apparent when I visited Bucharest’s National University of Drama and Film (U.N.A.T.C.), a venerable institution housed in a building rumored to have been previously used as a training facility for the Securitate, Ceausescu’s notorious secret police. Mungiu, Porumboiu and Nemescu are all U.N.A.T.C. graduates, and Puiu currently teaches courses there in screen acting. Like much else in the city, the complex was under renovation, with freshly painted walls and tools banging and buzzing in the corridors and courtyards. In a drafty classroom downstairs, I was introduced to members of the faculty, who sat silently and warily, arms folded, as, with the help of an interpreter, I fumbled through an explanation of my interest in new Romanian film. It was not an interest any of them gave much indication of sharing, apart from one voluble professor. “We are all dinosaurs, but at least I will admit that I am one,” he announced, before going on to praise the achievements of his former students.

Afterward, feeling as if I had just failed an oral exam, I went upstairs to meet with some current students — about 40 of them, crowded into a small screening room. The difference between them and their professors seemed to be more than just a matter of age and status. They belonged to a different world, one in which I felt perfectly at home. I wanted to talk about Romanian cinema, and while they had a lot to say about the subject, they also wanted to talk about Borat and David Lynch, about Sundance and the Oscars, about Japanese anime and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”

Fost sau n-a fost? You tell me.

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’

“There is no Romanian film industry.” This is not another one of Cristi Puiu’s counterintuitive provocations but rather a statement I was to hear again and again in Bucharest as I visited the offices of film schools and production companies, a studio back lot and the headquarters of the National Center for Cinematography (C.N.C.). There was no shortage of industriousness, but Romania lacks the basic infrastructure that makes the cycle of production, distribution and exhibition viable in other countries. What is missing, above all, is movie theaters: there are around 80 cinemas serving a country of 22 million people, and 7 of the 42 largest municipalities have no movie screens at all. (In the United States there are almost 40,000 screens and millions of movie fans who still complain that there is nothing to see).

What Romania does have, in addition to a backlog of stories crying out to be told on screen, are traditions and institutions that give filmmakers at least some of the tools required to tell them. The “dinosaurs” at U.N.A.T.C. take their pupils through a rigorous program of instruction that includes courses in aesthetics and art history and requires them to make two 35-millimeter short films before graduating, one of them in black and white. This kind of old-school technical training, which extends to acting as well, surely accounts for some of the sophistication and self-assurance that Mungiu, Porumboiu and their colleagues display.

Not that anything comes easily. The shortage of screens means that the potential for domestic commercial returns is small, and therefore it is hard to attract substantial private investment, either from within Romania or from outside the country. And the scarcity of theaters makes exhibition quotas — which other countries use to protect their film industries from being overwhelmed by Hollywood — untenable. But if there is no film industry, there is at least a Law of Cinematography (modeled on a French statute) that establishes a mechanism by which the state helps finance movie production. Taxes collected on television advertising revenue, DVD sales and other media-related transactions go into a fund, money from which is distributed in a twice-yearly competition. Winning projects are ranked, with the top selections receiving as much as 50 percent of their production costs from the fund. Film costs tend to be modest — the budget of “4 Months” was around 700,000 euros — and the filmmakers have 10 years to pay back the state’s investment, at which point they own the film outright.

Many of the filmmakers I spoke to complained about the system. Porumboiu, impatient with its slow pace and bureaucratic obstacles, financed “12:08″ himself. Shortly before Cannes last year, Mungiu was involved in a public spat with the C.N.C. that made headlines in the local press. After a dispute with the center, Puiu circulated a letter pledging never to participate in the system again.

But a collection of the movies that arose from harmonious relations between filmmakers and their financiers would consist largely of home videos and vanity projects. Even frustrated artists, in other words, can flourish. And their success abroad, moreover, feeds the system with prestige and helps bring in money from the European Union and adventurous foreign investors.

Though Romania’s homegrown film industry will most likely remain small, it exists in close proximity to Hollywood itself. American audiences may not be familiar with “The Paper Will Be Blue” or “Stuff and Dough,” but those who have seen “Cold Mountain,” “Borat” or “Seed of Chucky” can claim some acquaintance with Romanian cinema, or at least with movies made in Romania. About 20 miles outside of Bucharest, where newly built suburban developments give way to farmland, is the Castel Film Studio, a vast complex that houses the largest soundstage in Europe, a 200,000-gallon tank for underwater filming and standing sets like city streets, a full-size wingless jet and the mountain hamlet from “Cold Mountain.”

Castel promises skilled labor at a lower cost than producers are likely to find in the United States or Western Europe (though the weakness of the dollar has made its prices a bit less attractive to Americans). Its crews are trained at the rigorous Romanian film schools, and in turn receive hands-on experience with equipment that is hard to come by in modest Romanian productions. Oleg Mutu, the director of photography who brought Bucharest to gloomy life in “Mr. Lazarescu” and “4 Months,” spent a few weeks operating a camera on “Cold Mountain.” Cristi Puiu recently shot an insurance commercial at Castel. The U.N.A.T.C. students, even as they dream of Golden Palms and envision making tough, realistic movies about immigrants, Gypsies and alienated youth, acknowledge that they are more likely to find paying work in advertising or television.

Meanwhile, the stars of the current wave — who are part of what is to my mind the most exciting development in a European national cinema since Spain in the 1980s — contemplate their next projects and prepare their proposals for the next round of C.N.C. competitions. One afternoon in Bucharest, Corneliu Porumboiu and I sat in the cafe at the Bucharest Cinematheque, drinking coffee and talking about movies: Woody Allen; “The Lives of Others”; the Italian neorealists. The Cinematheque is a kind of mothership for Bucharest cineastes. It’s where they went to discover exotic films when they were younger, and where their films are now shown and celebrated in a country without many other public places for movie going.

After a while, we got up, and Porumboiu offered to show me around the screening rooms. At the box-office entrance, decorated with a “4 Months, 3 Weeks and Two Days” flier, a guard confronted us and shooed us away. The facilities were closed. Porumboiu tried to explain that he wanted to show them to a guest from New York, but he was rebuffed. We could buy a ticket or rent out a theater, but we couldn’t just walk in and look around. And so we wandered away, to find another place to hang out in this bustling, bedraggled city. It occurred to me that maybe there was no Romanian translation of the sentence “Do you know who I am?” — which would have been the first thing out of an American director’s mouth in a similar situation. Or perhaps this was a double-edged metaphor: maybe in Bucharest, nowadays, a filmmaker with a prize from Cannes is nothing special.

LAS VEGAS – Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton won the Nevada caucuses on Saturday, capturing strong support from women voters and adding a fresh boost of momentum to her campaign as the Democratic presidential race heads to South Carolina, where she is engaged in a fierce battle with her rival, Senator Barack Obama.

Mrs. Clinton’s victory in Nevada – her second straight win over Mr. Obama – underscored her strength among Hispanic voters, who comprise a large share of the electorate in several upcoming states, as the campaign expands into a coast-to-coast series of 22 contests on Feb. 5.

The New York senator had 51 percent of the vote to Mr. Obama’s 45 percent, with just over 90 percent of the state’s caucuses reporting. John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina, faded to a distant third place with 4 percent of the vote.

“I guess this is how the West was won,” Mrs. Clinton told her supporters during a victory rally at the Planet Hollywood hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. Speaking over loud cheers, she added: “We will all be united in November. I don’t think politics is a game. I don’t think elections are just another day in the calendar.”

Mr. Obama, in a terse statement, barely acknowledged his defeat. “We ran an honest, uplifting campaign in Nevada that focused on the real problems Americans are facing, a campaign that appealed to people’s hopes instead of their fears,” he said. “That’s the campaign we’ll take to South Carolina and across America in the weeks to come, and that’s how we will truly bring about the change this country is hungry for.”

Mr. Obama said that he received more national delegates in Nevada than Mrs. Clinton because of his strong performance across the state, “including rural areas where Democrats have traditionally struggled.”

But some election officials said they were confused about Mr. Obama’s claim that he more delegates than Mrs. Clinton.

“I don’t know why they’re saying that,” said Jill Derby, president of the Nevada State Democratic Party, referring to the Obama campaign. “We don’t select our national delegates the way they’re saying. We won’t select national delegates for a few more months.”

In terms of the popular vote, Mrs. Clinton won most of her support in Nevada’s southern counties, while Mr. Obama was more popular in the north. Clark County, home to Las Vegas and its influential union blocs, was supporting Mrs. Clinton by an 11-point margin with 93 percent of its caucuses reporting.

Mr. Edwards’s campaign issued a statement that described the senator as an underdog “facing two $100 million candidates” and emphasized his platform against lobbyists and special interests.

“The nomination won’t be decided by win-loss records, but by delegates, and we’re ready to fight for every delegate,” the statement said.

State party officials said more than 107,000 Nevada voters attended the caucuses. It is the third state in the row to achieve record-setting turnout in the Democratic presidential nominating fight, which party strategists believe is a referendum on the Bush administration and a strong call for a new direction in Washington.

Before leaving town, the candidates made separate stops to visit hotel and casino workers, making a final appeal for support.

Voters across Nevada poured into hundreds of neighborhood precincts across the state, as well as a handful of casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, to voice their preference in the Democratic presidential campaign.

In a brief morning stop by the Mirage casino and hotel, Mr. Obama was asked whether the outcome would influence voters in South Carolina, where Democrats will vote next Saturday.

“All these things add up,” Mr. Obama said.

Nevada, the third stop in the Democratic presidential nominating fight, was perhaps the most mysterious among the early-voting states. There was no clear front runner, no reliable polling data, and no institutional history. All candidates worked feverishly to manage – usually lowering – their expectations.

The Democratic caucus, never even a minor factor in past primary seasons, has historically attracted only the party faithful; only about 9,000 people participated in the 2004 caucuses at a handful of sites. Party officials were uncertain about turnout on Saturday, but preliminary reports suggested that participation was significantly higher.

At the Flamingo hotel, one of the at-large caucus sites on the Las Vegas Strip, it was a chaotic scene. Inside the Sunset Ballroom, 245 voters registered their attendance before breaking off into their preference groups.

Maids and cooks, bellmen and bartenders – nearly all of whom wore their uniforms and matching nametags – were standing more than 20 deep. To attend the caucus, they took an hour lunch break, but as the proceedings stretched beyond the allotted time, some of the voters asked if they could leave.

A boxed lunch was served and the proceedings were translated into Spanish.

“No matter what happens at the end of this, we will leave as friends and Democrats will be working together,” the temporary chairwoman of the caucus said, standing at the front of the ballroom. “We want everyone to feel they can choose their own candidate without intimidation.”

Brenda Santiago, a housekeeper at nearby Harrah’s hotel and casino, arrived shortly before Noon. Although she is a member of the Culinary Workers Union, which supported Mr. Obama, she said she had been determined to choose her favorite candidate on her own.

And that, she said, was Senator Clinton.

“I have my own opinions,” said Ms. Santiago, 46. “Hillary has more experience – and she has Bill!”

The strength of Mr. Obama’s endorsement by the Culinary Workers Union remained an open question. The Clinton campaign had denounced the at-large precincts in casinos as unfair, but inside the Sunset Ballroom of the Flamingo Hotel, Mrs. Clinton received support from 121 people and 25 delegates, compared to 120 for Mr. Obama and 24 delegates.

The Clinton corner, dominated largely by women, cheered when the results were announced.

Nevada was chosen by the Democratic Party to hold an early contest, along with South Carolina, to increase both geographic and racial diversity. Still, as other states decided to move their primaries to Feb. 5, and the nation has focused on the traditional early states, Iowa and New Hampshire, Nevada had remained in the shadows, with fewer candidate visits and national attention.

That shifted after Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton split their earlier contests, and the culinary union here, which has about 60,000 members and is extremely influential in the Democratic stronghold of Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, and hopes to play a major role in the race, threw its endorsement to Mr. Obama in a suddenly-relevant rubber match.

Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton both had offices around the state, including the Republican strong hold of Elko county, and campaign staff workers have fought for Hispanic, working class and suburban voters.

BOSTON is a city of ghosts, but on the coldest of days, don’t expect them to come to you. Instead, visit Forest Hills Cemetery, a rambling Victorian-era burial ground about four miles from downtown and a splendidly quiet place to roam. Winding paths crisscross its 275 acres, and if you pick up a map by the entrance, you can find the graves of Anne Sexton, E. E. Cummings and Eugene O’Neill. Drive slowly along the narrow roads until you find a good place to park and wander. On a recent morning, snow crunched underfoot and fell in soft chunks from the treetops. Bliss.

After an hour or two of tromping, you will be thoroughly chilled and getting hungry. Drive a few miles north to Brookline, where you can thaw out by a stone hearth at the Fireplace, known for coziness and New England comfort food. The sweet-spiced squash bisque with Great Hill blue cheese and pumpkin seeds was a standout on my visit, but the tuna melt with Vermont Cheddar and the turkey club rolled in a Rhode Island johnnycake also caught my eye.

This being Boston, you must also feed your brain. In tweedy Cambridge, there is no better place to get lost than the aisles of Harvard Book Store, just off Harvard Square. It’s 75 years old and packed with titles familiar and unknown. There are separate sections for philosophy, cultural and critical theory and politics, as well as a vast fiction collection. Most customers are quietly engrossed, but you may encounter a conversation or two worth eavesdropping on.

Bundle up again and stroll a few blocks, window-shopping all the way, for your next bit of sustenance: an astoundingly rich hot cocoa at L. A. Burdick, a cafe and chocolate shop on the other side of Harvard Square. Choose from dark, milk or white chocolate, and if you dare risk overdosing, try one of Burdick’s famous chocolate mice on the side.

On the other side of the Charles River, nocturnal adventures await. Boston’s South End, brimming with homegrown shops and restaurants, historic brownstones and creative energy, is a fine place to end a wintry day. In the middle of it all is Sibling Rivalry, an upscale restaurant run by two brothers who create “dueling” menus with one set of main ingredients each season. The fall menu featured scallops, mushrooms, artichokes, bacon and beets — one brother concocted a salad of roasted beets with goat cheese fondue, walnuts and bibb lettuce, for example, while the other offered boneless short ribs of beef with roasted beets, ragout of salsify, pearl onions and carrots.

Just down the street, one of the city’s newest nightspots pulses with live music, mostly jazz, seven nights a week. Most performers are local, with the nearby Berklee College of Music providing a steady supply. You might catch a jazz organ trio, a bluesy jam band or a bossa nova chanteuse in the cavernous space, a former boiler room with exposed brick walls, red velvet curtains and funky chandeliers. Drinks like the Beehive Julep and the Moscow Mule (vodka, ginger beer and lime) will help you stay toasty.

If snow is falling, walk less than two blocks south to Union Park Street to glimpse a scene from 19th-century Boston before calling it a night. The narrow park, surrounded by cast-iron fences and gas lamps, will be lovely and still, a perfect precursor to sleep.

Forest Hills Cemetery, 95 Forest Hills Avenue, Jamaica Plain. The Fireplace, 1634 Beacon Street, Brookline; (617) 975-1900. Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge; (617) 661-1515. L. A. Burdick, 52-D Brattle Street, Cambridge; (617) 491-4340. Sibling Rivalry, 525 Tremont Street; (617) 338-5338. The Beehive, 541 Tremont Street; (617) 423-0069.

A THICK veil of snow had settled on Kilimanjaro the morning after my group arrived in Tanzania. Over breakfast, we gazed at the peak filling the sky above the palm trees of our hotel courtyard in Moshi, the town closest to the mountain. It was as Hemingway described it: “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”

I had wanted to climb to the roof of Africa before climate change erased its ice fields and the romance of its iconic “Snows of Kilimanjaro” image. But as we trudged across the 12,000-foot Shira plateau on Day 2 of our weeklong climb and gazed at the whiteness of the vast, humpbacked summit, I thought maybe I needn’t have worried.

An up-and-down-and-up traverse of the south face of Kibo, the tallest of the mountain’s three volcanic peaks, showed us a panorama of the summit ice cap and fractured tentacles of glacial ice that dangled down gullies dividing the vertical rock faces. And four days later, when we reached 19,340-foot Uhuru, the highest point on Kibo, we beheld snow and ice fields so enormous as to resemble the Arctic.

It looked nothing like the photographs of Kibo nearly denuded of ice and snow in the Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” Nor did it seem to jibe with the film’s narrative: “Within the decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.”

As it turned out, we had simply been lucky.

This was the last week of January — nearly a year ago — and the middle of the dry season. But several weeks of heavy rain and snow preceded the arrival of our group, 10 mountaineering clients and a professional guide from International Mountain Guides, based near Seattle. That made for a freakishly well-fed snow pack and the classic snowy image portrayed on travel posters, the label of the local Kilimanjaro Premium Lager and the T-shirts hawked in Moshi’s tourist bazaars. But to many climate scientists and glaciologists who have probed and measured, the disappearance of the summit’s ice fields is inevitable and imminent.

Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University who has studied Kilimanjaro’s ice fields for years, photographed the summit a year to the week, coincidentally, before we were there. He found only a few, isolated snow patches in shaded areas, a drastic difference from what we encountered. Even on the world’s highest free-standing volcano, seasonal snow doesn’t remain on a peak so close to the Equator.

One of our Tanzanian guides, John Mtui, a tall, bespectacled and soft-spoken Chagga — the people who inhabit Kilimanjaro’s southern foothills — began climbing the mountain as a porter 25 years earlier, when he was 18. “When I first started climbing, we had big snow, big glaciers,” Mr. Mtui said. “The glaciers were bigger and taller than now. And also, the weather changed. We had heavier rain than we have now.”

Like other exotic destinations widely believed to be threatened by degradation from climate change, the mountain’s precariousness has become a marketing opportunity. The adventure travel industry sends about 30,000 climbers a year toward Kilimanjaro’s summit. Scientific and outdoor magazines mention the imminent loss of the ice fields. So do guide services and outfitters on their Web sites. Our climb leader, Justin Merle, a mellow 6-foot-4 man in his late 20s who has a world-class mountaineering résumé, said of the typical adventure-travel article: “It’s like, ‘See Kili Before the Snow Is Gone.’ That’s almost a catchphrase.”

Given Kilimanjaro’s snow, glaciers and volcanic upbringing, it didn’t look all that different from peaks I’ve climbed in my native Northwest. From my living room in Seattle, I can gaze at Mount Rainier, which I’ve climbed a dozen times. Even in the dead of summer, it retains a mantle of ice that makes it seem like a hulking life form. Kilimanjaro is almost unimaginably bigger: nearly a mile higher, it covers 1,250 square miles abutting Kenya.

And yet, unlike Rainier, climbing Kilimanjaro required no real mountaineering skills, no ice axes, ropes or crampons, merely strong legs, hearts and lungs for trudging more than three and a half vertical miles above sea level. That, and a supply of Diamox, to fend off altitude sickness.

Our approach was on the Machame, the most scenic and second-most heavily traveled — a distant second — of the six designated routes to the summit. Even so, our six camps along the way, five on the ascent and one on the descent, were 200-tent metropolises.

The most heavily congested approach is the Marangu, called the “tourist” or “Coca-Cola” route, a reflection of its overcrowded, touristy ambience and the ubiquitous soft drink, which is sold at camps along the way. Our longer, more macho Machame is known as the “whiskey route.”

The trip to the summit and back down again covered 39 miles. Most of my companions were seasoned hikers and backpackers but had scant mountaineering experience. Two exceptions were Todd Ziegler, an orthopedic surgeon from an Atlanta suburb, and his friend, Julie Nellis, a physical therapist from Atlanta, a diminutive but tireless, multisport athlete and the only woman on the trip. Both had climbed Rainier and major summits in the Sierra Nevada, the Rockies, Mexico and elsewhere.

Mr. Merle had already guided expeditions to four of the Seven Summits — Aconcagua, Everest, McKinley and Vinson Massif in Antarctica. Kilimanjaro was his easiest. We 11 Americans were the pampered tip of a human iceberg that included three Tanzanian guides and 38 porters and cooks, all Chaggas. They cooked and served our meals, boiled our water and carried much of our individual gear along with cook pots, food, our sleeping tents and a walk-in dining tent. As we’d trudge with our day packs up the mountain, the porters — some in their midteens — would overtake us while hauling on their backs our duffels containing our sleeping bags and extra clothing, tents and plastic armchairs. “Jambo,” they’d murmur, Swahili for “hello”; it was a polite way of saying, “Coming through. Step aside.”

We passed through ecological zones of spectacular diversity: equatorial rain forest, followed by misty heath and moors dotted with outsize, otherworldly flora, then alpine high desert and finally the frigid, dry summit zone. It was all on trail, but several steep stretches required grabbing handholds on near-vertical rock.

At 5,718 feet at the trailhead Machame Gate, we set out on a muddy track in the rain forest, thick with vines, old-man’s-beard and trees perched atop giant above-ground roots. The cloudy sky abruptly gave way to heavy rain, which ceased once we made our way up a misty hogback ridge onto the Shira plateau, covered with giant heathers and sprinkled with glossy volcanic obsidian.

As we traversed the plateau, gaining, losing and regaining elevation between 12,300 feet and 15,200 feet, four of us took Mr. Merle’s offer to make a side trip to the Lava Tower, a black volcanic plug rising some 300 vertical feet above the plateau, while the others hiked on to the next camp.

I get spooked scrambling up even nontechnical vertical rock. But when Mr. Merle asked if any of us wanted to ascend the tower, and Ms. Nellis instantly chirped, “I want to go,” the rest of us followed, assisted by Mr. Merle and Mr. Mtui in finding each handhold and foothold.

In the moors were the region’s most distinctively weird plants: colonnade-like, eight-foot lobelias and clusters of tree-size senecio kilimanjari, or giant groundsels, with clumps of cabbage-shaped leaf clusters atop withered-looking trunks.

Kilimanjaro’s abundant wildlife was rarely visible. Small snakes and monkeys scurried away from us in the rain forest. Jet-black, white-necked ravens — sturdy, hatchet-beaked, mean-looking — uttered guttural croaks as they fought over food scraps at the higher camps.

At our highest camp, austere Barafu (ice in Swahili) on a cliff top at 15,200 feet, the only permanent residents were primitive lichens and mosses. From there, starting at midnight with headlamps, we clambered, gulping thin air, up frozen scree the final 4,100 vertical feet to the summit. “Pole-pole,” the porters counseled, Swahili for slowly. As if we could do otherwise.

On several steep, single-file stretches, we waged elbow and expletive duels with Italian, American and Russian parties trying to crowd past us and other teams who were slowed by traffic jams of climbers above us.

Patchy snow covered the upper slopes above approximately 18,500 feet. At dawn, as we reached Stella Point at the lower lip of Kibo’s summit crater, the fluted walls of the flat-topped Rebmann Glacier stretched out to our left.

Snow blanketed the summit area, a mile and a half wide and hemmed by glaciers. Uhuru, the highest point in all Africa, was a 45-minute slog ahead.

From there, we gazed toward Kenya, obscured by clouds, on the mountain’s northern flank. In the distance to the southwest rose the volcanic cone of Mount Meru, 15,000 feet. Seven miles to the east, yet still part of the Kilimanjaro massif, was its fanged, eroded, second-highest peak and Africa’s third highest, 16,893-foot Mawenzi. (Mount Kenya, about 90 miles north of Nairobi, is No. 2 at 17,058 feet.)

All 10 of us reached the summit, even two stragglers fighting altitude sickness. That let International Mountain Guides continue to boast of a 100 percent success rate in getting its Kilimanjaro clients to the top. That flies in the face of the mountain’s overall record, thought to be roughly 50 percent failures, mainly on the less acclimatization-friendly Marangu route.

After the ascent, we dropped 4,100 feet back down loose scree to Barafu for a brief rest. Then we descended another 5,000 vertical feet, the last hours in a downpour, to muddy Mweka Camp, our final overnight, in the rain forest.

There, we beheld a most welcome namesake of the mountain: Kilimanjaro Premium Lager, sold by the Mweka park ranger out of his tiny hut.

Descending the final 4,800 feet of elevation to Mweka Gate, we found a clamorous gaggle of local entrepreneurs hustling T-shirts, souvenirs and services. Two dollars bought me an incomparable bargain: a thorough scrubbing, rinsing and wiping of my mud-caked boots, gaiters and trekking poles.

Back at the Keys Hotel in Moshi that night, the local lager was the official beverage of our victory celebration. On its label, at least, Kilimanjaro’s snows would never disappear.

IF YOU GO

Kilimanjaro has two main climbing seasons: January through February and mid-June through mid-October, typically the most stable weather periods. The mountain has six established routes to the summit, some of them demanding mountaineering routes. The most heavily used trekking route is the Marangu, but other routes take longer to reach the summit and allow for more gradual acclimatization.

Numerous adventure travel companies in the United States and abroad offer guided climbs of Kilimanjaro. International Mountain Guides (360-569-2609; www.mountainguides.com), which has led treks to the summit since 1989, takes the Machame route. There are a 7-day climb for $3,600 and a 15-day trip for $4,975 that includes a wildlife safari to the Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti Plain. Prices include park fees and in-country travel.

Alpine Ascents International (206-378-1927; www.alpineascents.com) has scheduled 2008 winter climbs at about $5,600, via Machame and including a safari in a 15-day trip. There are climb-only ($4,700) and safari-only ($2,500) options.

Rainier Mountaineering (888-892-5462 or 360-569-2227; www.rmiguides.com) offers a 13-day climb via the Machame route and a safari for $4,895 or a 9-day climb-only trip for $3,495.

Mountain Travel Sobek (888-687-6235 or 510-594-6000; www.mtsobek.com) takes trekkers on a less traveled route, the Rongai, to Kilimanjaro’s summit in a 14-day trip that includes a wildlife safari and a stay on Kenya‘s coast. Prices start at $5,995 plus $1,050 for park fees and $300 for in-country airfare, or a 10-day climb-only option for $3,995 plus $975 for park fees and $200 for in-country airfare.

TOKYO — Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a subgenre unworthy of the country that gave the world its first novel, “The Tale of Genji,” a millennium ago. Then last month, the year-end best-seller tally showed that cellphone novels, republished in book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to dominate it.

Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere.

“Will cellphone novels kill ‘the author’?” a famous literary journal, Bungaku-kai, asked on the cover of its January issue. Fans praised the novels as a new literary genre created and consumed by a generation whose reading habits had consisted mostly of manga, or comic books. Critics said the dominance of cellphone novels, with their poor literary quality, would hasten the decline of Japanese literature.

Whatever their literary talents, cellphone novelists are racking up the kind of sales that most more experienced, traditional novelists can only dream of.

One such star, a 21-year-old woman named Rin, wrote “If You” over a six-month stretch during her senior year in high school. While commuting to her part-time job or whenever she found a free moment, she tapped out passages on her cellphone and uploaded them on a popular Web site for would-be authors.

After cellphone readers voted her novel No. 1 in one ranking, her story of the tragic love between two childhood friends was turned into a 142-page hardcover book last year. It sold 400,000 copies and became the No. 5 best-selling novel of 2007, according to a closely watched list by Tohan, a major book distributor.

“My mother didn’t even know that I was writing a novel,” said Ms. Rin, who, like many cellphone novelists, goes by only one name. “So at first when I told her, well, I’m coming out with a novel, she was like, what?

“She didn’t believe it until it came out and appeared in book stores.”

The cellphone novel was born in 2000 after a home-page-making Web site, Maho no i-rando, realized that many users were writing novels on their blogs; it tinkered with its software to allow users to upload works in progress and readers to comment, creating the serialized cellphone novel. But the number of users uploading novels began booming only two to three years ago, and the number of novels listed on the site reached one million last month, according to Maho no i-rando.

The boom appeared to have been fueled by a development having nothing to do with culture or novels but by mobile-phone companies’ decision to offer unlimited transmission of packet data, like text-messaging, as part of flat monthly rates. The largest provider, Docomo, began offering this service in mid-2004.

“Their cellphone bills were easily reaching $1,000, so many people experienced what they called ‘packet death,’ and you wouldn’t hear from them for a while,” said Shigeru Matsushima, an editor who oversees the book uploading site at Starts Publishing, a leader in republishing cellphone novels.

The affordability of cellphones coincided with the coming of age of a generation of Japanese for whom cellphones, more than personal computers, had been an integral part of their lives since junior high school. So they read the novels on their cellphones, even though the same Web sites were also accessible by computer. They punched out text messages with their thumbs with blinding speed, and used expressions and emoticons, like smilies and musical notes, whose nuances were lost on anyone over the age of 25.

“It’s not that they had a desire to write and that the cellphone happened to be there,” said Chiaki Ishihara, an expert in Japanese literature at Waseda University who has studied cellphone novels. “Instead, in the course of exchanging e-mail, this tool called the cellphone instilled in them a desire to write.”

Indeed, many cellphone novelists had never written fiction before, and many of their readers had never read novels before, according to publishers.

Cellphone writers are not paid for their work, no matter how many millions of times their novels might be read online. The payoff, if any, comes when the novels are reproduced and sold as traditional books. Readers have free access to the Web sites that carry the novels, or pay at most $1 to $2 a month, but the sites make most of their money from advertising.

Critics say the novels owe a lot to a genre devoured by the young: comic books. In cellphone novels, characters tend to remain undeveloped and descriptions thin, while paragraphs are often fragments and consist mostly of dialogue.

“Traditionally, Japanese would depict a scene emotionally, like ‘The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country,’ ” Mika Naito, a novelist, said, referring to the famous opening sentence of Yasunari Kawabata’s “Snow Country.”

“In cellphone novels, you don’t need that,” said Ms. Naito, 36, who recently began writing cellphone novels at the urging of her publisher. “If you limit it to a certain place, readers won’t be able to feel a sense of familiarity.”

Written in the first person, many cellphone novels read like diaries. Almost all the authors are young women delving into affairs of the heart, spiritual descendants, perhaps, of Shikibu Murasaki, the 11th century royal lady-in-waiting who wrote “The Tale of Genji.”

“Love Sky,” a debut novel by a young woman named Mika, was read by 20 million people on cellphones or on computers, according to Maho no i-rando, where it was first uploaded. A tear-jerker featuring adolescent sex, rape, pregnancy and a fatal disease — the genre’s sine qua non — the novel nevertheless captured the young generation’s attitude, its verbal tics and the cellphone’s omnipresence. Republished in book form, it became the No. 1 selling novel last year and was made into a movie.

Given the cellphone novels’ domination of the mainstream, critics no longer dismiss them, though some say they should be classified with comic books or popular music.

Ms. Rin said ordinary novels left members of her generation cold.

“They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them,” she said. “On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don’t want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable. But I’d like cellphone novels to be recognized as a genre.”

As the genre’s popularity leads more people to write cellphone novels, though, an existential question has arisen: can a work be called a cellphone novel if it is not composed on a cellphone, but on a computer or, inconceivably, in longhand?

“When a work is written on a computer, the nuance of the number of lines is different, and the rhythm is different from writing on a cellphone,” said Keiko Kanematsu, an editor at Goma Books, a publisher of cellphone novels. “Some hard-core fans wouldn’t consider that a cellphone novel.”

Still, others say the genre is not defined by the writing tool.

Ms. Naito, the novelist, said she writes on a computer and sends the text to her cellphone, with which she rearranges the content. Unlike the first-time cellphone novelists in their teens or early 20s, Ms. Naito said she felt more comfortable writing on a computer.

But at least one member of the cellphone generation has made the switch to computers. A year ago, one of Starts Publishing’s young stars, Chaco, gave up her phone even though she could compose much faster with it by tapping with her thumb.

“Because of writing on the cellphone, her nail had cut into the flesh and became bloodied,” said Mr. Matsushita of Starts.

“Since she’s switched to a computer,” he added, “her vocabulary’s gotten richer and her sentences have also grown longer.”

I. The Grammarian

Everything started as expected. Shelby Lynne, the torchy pop singer, and her band, about a half-dozen slightly shaggy regular Joes, ambled into the Viceroy, a retro lounge in downtown Seattle, in early November, looking to get a head start on Saturday night. They were in town to perform songs from her new CD, “Just a Little Lovin’,” a tribute to Dusty Springfield, due out Jan. 29, but because their concert wasn’t for a couple of days, Lynne announced, with a knee slap in her voice: “I am off work! I want to get drunk and hear some music.” Here was the fabled good ol’ girl, who, even though she junked Nashville and country music more than a decade earlier, still had plenty of country spirit. A few rounds were served; jocularity ensued. That is, until the end of her second Chopin martini (three olives), when the air started to get a little thin.

“Do you know the difference between the words ‘bringing’ and ‘taking’?” she practically whispered into my sleeve, as if not to embarrass me. “Because you just used one of them incorrectly.” I do know the difference, and though I couldn’t remember what I said, I agreed with her anyway, dizzied by the sudden altitude of the conversation. Lynne then proceeded to conduct a sobering mini-symposium on grammar: subjective and objective cases; “begging” versus “raising” the question; parts of speech. “It’s all about using the proper pronouns,” she asserted with the calm authority of a linguistics maven promoting her latest book on NPR.

I’d heard some choice nouns applied to Lynne. “Aren’t ‘hellcat’ and ‘spitfire’ the words most used to describe you?” her road manager, Tim Aller, said a little later that night. I’d also heard some prime adjectives: “misunderstood” and, sliding down the politeness scale, “gnarly” and “volatile.” (“Please go easy on Shelby if she gets a little tipsy,” one of her staff members had entreated.) But there she sat on the leather banquette, bolt upright, a model of prim-and-trim rectitude, in her smart blazer, jeans and boots, her peroxided hair parted, layered and quietly falling onto her shoulders. Well, why not? Her songs, often about recalcitrant, neglectful or hesitant lovers, are highly literate, and her background is not quite as off-road as it has often been portrayed. And while it’s true that she has been hardened by a single, horrific event — the murder-suicide of her parents when she was a teenager — she has refused to let that frame the conversation about her. Maybe this pedagogic interlude was just an extension of the contemplative artist, whose work has won critical acclaim and seemed to position her, early in this decade, as the next important grown-up pop singer for greater America.

Suddenly one corner of her mouth slid up. “Hay-ull, what do I know?” she said, her Alabama drawl, usually a slow drip when she sings, now in full stream. “I didn’t go to college.” Lesson over. Lynne was back to the good ol’ girl: she inquired after the score of the L.S.U.-Alabama game and reeled off some college-football rankings. Another list was lingering in the air, too — that week’s music charts. “Did you see that Alison Krauss debuted at No. 2 this week with her album with Robert Plant?” one of her band members said. The unlikely pairing of Krauss, the bluegrass singer and fiddler, and Plant, the lead singer of Led Zeppelin, was looking as if it might become the biggest hit in her career, which was already studded with millions in sales and a wall of Grammys (20 at last count).

“That li’l bitch, doesn’t she have enough already?” Lynne said. Lynne clearly didn’t begrudge Krauss the success, but she had to be wondering why she hasn’t had at least a sliver of the platinum pie. That particular week in early November was a good one for country pop; landing ahead of Krauss on the charts, at No. 1, was Carrie Underwood, the “American Idol” ingénue whose second album, “Carnival Ride,” sold more than 500,000 copies in its first week. And Reba McEntire, the country doyenne, also reached No. 1 a few weeks before that with an album of duets. Meanwhile, Lynne, though she’s not a country singer anymore, looked with some melancholy on the success of her estranged musical cousins. She has yet to go platinum — with all eight of her albums combined. “The only way to get ahead in the music business these days is to call up all your friends,” she said. “To pool your resources.”

In a sense that is what Lynne is doing with “Just a Little Lovin’,” calling back Springfield, the sultry British chanteuse and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who died in 1999 and with whom Lynne is sometimes compared, to help her finally break her commercial curse. She came close with her first post-Nashville album, “I Am Shelby Lynne,” which garnered enthusiastic reviews and led to a surprise Best New Artist Grammy in 2001 — surprise considering how long she’d been in the business. But the usual post-Grammy anointing by a broader public never happened. She always seemed to release the right album at the wrong time, or the wrong album at the right time, or release the wrong single, or be on the wrong label, or even wear the wrong outfit (she collected that Grammy, in front of millions of viewers getting their first good look at her, in a skimpy two-piece that, as my mother used to say about Carly Simon’s risqué get-ups in the ’70s, almost missed).

Now the hope is, with an album of songs that people already know, Lynne’s commercial stars might finally align. If she were 10 or 15 years younger — Lynne is 39 — she might be Carrie Underwood or Kellie Pickler, blowing away the “American Idol” panel with her earthy, passionate voice and booking a ride to the top of the charts. While 39 doesn’t necessarily mean senescence in pop music the way it once might have — Bruce Springsteen picked up his most recent No. 1 album at age 58; that’s eight years older than Frank Sinatra was when he recorded “Strangers in the Night” — it is a little long in the tooth to be looking for your first big hit.

But the album’s release was still more than two months away, and the concert was still two nights away, and it was time for Saturday night to resume. Lynne put a temporary ban on shoptalk and instructed everyone to head for dinner. At the restaurant she admired the young maître’d's black onyx earrings, practically yanking them from his ears and fingering the piercings, which were the size of pennies. (“How’d you get ‘em so big?” she asked. “Practice,” he replied.) When we were seated, she painted, or rather drew, herself into a corner of the rectangular table; for a restaurant with such a pricey wine list, it seemed surprising that there were crayons available, but there they were, and Lynne bowed her head and started sketching furiously on the paper tablecloth, finishing with something resembling a fat brown spruce. She checked everyone else’s drawings, topped off everyone’s wineglass and went back to her tree. Here was the nurturing den mother.

Then came the Britney moment.

“I just wanna make my [adjective] music, man,” she said, bobbing up, crayon rattling in hand, seemingly unconcerned with who was in earshot. Her entourage raised half a collective eyebrow — they seemed used to this kind of outburst — but then resumed eating as Lynne, her blue-steel eyes narrowed and fixed on me, issued what seemed to be both an apology and a warning. “I’ve just been burned so many [adjective] times.”

So now, in addition to good ol’ girl, contemplative artist and nurturing den mother, there was bratty star. In three hours, Lynne had revealed the ingredients of the potent cocktail that has created some exquisite music but also a constant, almost entitled sense of embattlement, which might have helped keep her at arm’s length from a large audience. “Mañana,” she cooed a few minutes later, referring to a meeting we’d scheduled and adding another persona, sexy vamp, to the list. It was as if to say, now that she’d gotten all that out of her system, she was ready to begin.

II. The Look of Lunch

Seattle: crunchy and aerobic, city of steep hills, high literacy, designer caffeine bars. Shelby Lynne, though, declined my offer to meet at one of its main attractions — I’d suggested the Rem Koolhaas-designed library — and instead took the elevator down from her hotel room and walked a few steps across the street to Cyclops, a bar (her kind of bar, the old-fashioned kind). There was a portly bartender, football on the TV and a felt poster of mid-’70s Elvis (shades and spangles but not yet busting out of his jumpsuit) on the wall behind the table in the front window, where I found Lynne installed at 12:30 in the afternoon, halfway through a Guinness.

She flicked a “Hey” off her lips, and from behind her ice blue sunglasses — there was actually sun in Seattle that day, and it was pouring through the window — she motioned to the seat across from her. I was struck again by how petite she is, almost tomboyish, though it always seems to be the case with these divas when they show up in person: they never take up as much space as their big voices and outsize reputations might suggest. And Lynne, in a variation of yesterday’s blazer-and-jeans ensemble, looked ready for business, peace-sign necklace around her neck, her blond hair now pulled back and up and making her resemble a pert alumna of a Beach Boys song. We started to talk about the new album and Springfield. Then another legendary diva interrupted us.

“Badass!” Lynne exclaimed. “Midnight Train to Georgia” was piping through the sound system. “A bass, drums, piano and guitar. That’s all you need. And a badass singer like Gladys Knight.” She took a long sip of her Guinness. “Oh, yeah, and the Pips. They were O.K.”

Knight and Elvis, Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell, Nancy Wilson and Brook Benton, all singers from different backgrounds, all staking claims to different eras and different styles, but all with a certain similar elemental approach to singing that appeals to Lynne and places them among her favorites. It’s that same vocal immersion that drew her to Springfield, although she admits she was late to get hip: she was introduced to Springfield only about 15 years ago, during Lynne’s musical hash-slinging days in Nashville. “Somebody gave me a copy of ‘Dusty in Memphis,’ ” she said, referring to Springfield’s sea-parting 1969 LP. “And I thought, Damn, that’s the kind of record I want to make.” On her new CD — nine songs from Springfield’s catalog, plus one original — Lynne in fact bites off a big chaw of “Dusty in Memphis” (though she wisely avoids the untouchable “Son of a Preacher Man”) and also tackles a handful of Springfield’s steamy hit singles like “The Look of Love” and “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.” “I started listening to Dusty, Al Green and the Plastic Ono Band all at the same time,” she said, “and I knew I had to get the hell out of Nashville.”

Lynne, who came from a musical family (“I was singing before I could talk,” she said), moved to Nashville from Alabama in 1989 a few years after her parents’ death, when she was 20, shopped a few songs around and before long had a deal with CBS Records. But it also wasn’t long before she rankled under the tight musical and image control that the country-music capital is wont to impose on its young artists. Lynne, who’d lived her life till then basically bucking and throwing riders, was not one to conform. “When I was growing up,” she said, “we always had quality music in the house. It was the Mills Brothers, the Everly Brothers, Elvis, the Beatles, Waylon and Willie. We never listened to crap. And then I got to Nashville and was told what to record, what to wear. I thought: You’re gonna tell me what to sing? What to wear?”

She lasted for four albums and notched a few minor country hits. She even won the Academy of Country Music’s Top New Female Vocalist award in 1991. But after about a decade and increasingly diminishing record sales, she’d had enough, and the feeling was mutual. “I think she was recognized as one of the greatest singers in a city full of good singers,” says Luke Lewis, president of Lost Highway Records, Lynne’s current label, and a veteran of the Nashville scene. “But she’s tempestuous, and Nashville is known to be intolerant of tempestuousness. It got her into trouble with the gatekeepers, the ones who decide what gets on the radio, on TV, what gets printed.”

Lynne’s voice, eyes, carriage, soften when she talks about the music fans in Nashville, explaining that they weren’t the problem. When she recently performed a brief concert there to introduce her new album, she told me: “They were still with me, they didn’t let me down. They never have.” But she’s less generous about the state of country music today. “I don’t like modern country music,” she said. “It’s not what I’m into, is all. I’m old-school. I tend to like Tammy Wynette, Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers. . . . The new stuff all sounds the same. I’m not ragging on anybody, but it doesn’t require emotional involvement. What Carrie Underwood is singing about has already been heard. It’s in a beautiful package. But my duty is to take the hard route.”

That route led her West, with everything she owned in two suitcases, toward Los Angeles. It was one occasion when Lynne’s fearlessness paid off, as she sought out Bill Bottrell, producer of Sheryl Crow‘s “Tuesday Night Music Club,” another album she admired. She was armed with demo recordings of her new style: quieter, suffused with heartbreak to be sure, but more elliptical than her lyrically and musically too-on-the-nose country recordings. Bottrell signed on, and in 1999, “I Am Shelby Lynne” emerged. It was a smoldering statement of desire and betrayal, all simmering under jabbing horns, jittery strings, Lynne’s yearning acoustic guitar, even the occasional electronic blip and honk. It was a long way from Nashville and finally, it seemed, just where Lynne wanted to be. “That album came from the most vulnerable, desperate place,” she said. “I think about it every day.”

Critics thought about it a lot, too, at least then. It ended up on many best-of-year lists, and Lynne was talked about not just as a first-class songwriter like Crow but also as the next major interpretive singer in the line of Annie Lennox and k.d. lang, a line that extends back to Springfield herself. The yearlong steady drumbeat for the album seemed to reach its loudest point when Lynne won her Grammy. But by then the record was more than a year old and had not sold well, and her label had decided that it wanted a new album from her, that it would no longer promote “I Am Shelby Lynne.” On the night of the awards ceremony, according to a friend, Lynne stormed around, mowing down and cursing out even friends and people who worked on the album, because it hadn’t sold more. (At last count it was up to 246,000 copies, respectable but hardly the breakthrough that Lynne was expecting.) Bucking and throwing riders.

She did calm down long enough to land a song in the movie “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” It was catchy and sharp and seemed to have “hit single” and maybe even “Oscar nomination” written all over it. Except it was called “Killin’ Kind,” and, released around 9/11, was doomed. “There’s no way that radio was going to play anything with ‘kill’ in the title,” says her manager, Elizabeth Jordan. For the album that followed shortly thereafter, “Love, Shelby,” her label, Def Jam, teamed her with Glen Ballard, who produced Alanis Morissette‘s “Jagged Little Pill,” and Lynne’s frank, no-frills songwriting seemed at odds with the splashy soundscape. It was a slightly dumbed-down “I Am Shelby Lynne.” The Britney Spears-like cover, which pictured Lynne kneeling in cutoffs and lettering done in lipstick, didn’t help. Critics brayed. Even many of her longtime fans, sensing she was grasping a little too hard for the pop prize, rejected it. “I got nailed,” she said. “It was such a catastrophe.” Lynne’s decade of musical soul searching, just on the verge of paying off, seemed to bleed out in a matter of a few months.

She went back to basics. After taking a few years off, to help a friend through breast-cancer treatment and to recover herself from the career tremor, she recorded a couple of spare albums for Capitol, “Identity Crisis” and “Suit Yourself,” even though she was loath to enter the music-business fray again. “I thought, Oh, you major-label [noun, pl.], you break my heart every time.” Those albums, which melded the best of Lynne’s country and pop instincts, got her back on solid footing with her core audience and with critics, but she still couldn’t reach the larger public. “With every one of my albums,” she said, “I always say, ‘This is going to be the one, this is going to be the one,’ and then we go through the whole process, and in the end maybe 5,000 more people know my name.”

Lynne dipped into acting, landing the part of Carrie Cash, Johnny’s Cash’s mother, in “Walk the Line.” And then while she was casting about for her next musical direction, she remembered an e-mail message from Barry Manilow, who was a fan, suggesting she record an album of Dusty Springfield songs. “It’s usually career suicide to do an album of covers,” she said. “But I thought, Why the hell not? I didn’t have enough new songs of my own anyway.”

Lynne might have had an easier time coming up with 10 songs from scratch. Springfield’s body of work is known for its musical and emotional depth and seems only to grow in stature: a critics’ poll in Rolling Stone a few years ago ranked “Dusty in Memphis” as the third-most-important album by a woman in the rock era, behind only Aretha Franklin‘s “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You” and Joni Mitchell‘s “Blue.” When she heard about the concept of Lynne’s new album, Rita Houston, the music director of WFUV, the influential public radio station in New York, and long a supporter of Lynne’s, said, “My first thought was, These aren’t the easiest songs in the world to sing.” And while Springfield’s and Lynne’s styles overlap in the softer, breathier moments, there are significant differences. For all her husky, romantic realism, Springfield had essentially a glam, cosmopolitan sound: she was about chandeliers and candlelight, good Champagne (bubbly with a kick) and crushed velvet. Hers was an inside voice. Lynne’s rootsy voice comes from the outside: blinding summer suns, dark, deserted blacktops, a quick slug of Jack. Even when she ends up in the bedroom, she takes a rougher road.

So it was important to have the right producer, one who could be true to the integrity of the material while allowing Lynne the flexibility to put it in her own voice. And here her luck was good: she landed Phil Ramone, the veteran producer of classic albums by Paul Simon and Billy Joel and the engineer for Springfield’s original recording of “The Look of Love.” Ramone kept the tracks lean, no strings or horns, just Lynne and her band, recording on analog equipment, and they did the whole album in five days. “When Shelby sings, she owns the song,” Ramone says. “But she was so intent on being correct. She was a nervous wreck. We listened to hundreds of Dusty’s songs. But we knew in the end she had to be herself. Otherwise you start to sound like a mid-’70s record.”

Forty years or so on, these songs are served both by Lynne’s respect for them and by her wariness of them. You can feel her tunneling a little harder to the deep emotional warrens that Springfield had express access to, but she gets there just the same. It’s not just a matter of her winning over the songs; it’s also a matter of them winning over her. The album’s highlight may be her conversion of Springfield’s first big hit, “I Only Want to Be With You.” For Springfield it was a mid-’60s carnival joyride. For Lynne, it’s a country-lane saunter that celebrates the satisfaction of adult romance. “Look, I don’t want to be Dusty,” Lynne said. “I just want to remind people about her and about these great songs. I wanted to make the kind of album that she might have made today.”

There are some solid parallels, though, musical and non-, between the two women. “Dusty in Memphis,” for all its acclaim, wasn’t much of a hit when it was released, just as “I Am Shelby Lynne” wasn’t. Springfield, like Lynne, could be temperamental; she was a perfectionist who frequently delivered the goods in the 59th minute of the 11th hour, and watch out if you got in her way before then. And then there were the gay rumors that dogged Springfield most of her career, which in her case turned out to be true, though she never used the word “lesbian” officially. That same speculation has followed around Lynne, who was married briefly when she was 18, and neither will she confirm nor deny, saying only that she goes where the love is. “I’ve done everything on every corner of the universe,” Lynne said, “but I’m not going to make an announcement about it.”

And there’s one more, eerie similarity. Toward the end of an interview I did with Springfield for this magazine outside London in 1995, she asked if I would be exploring the city alone that night, and when I said yes, she cautioned me. “Be careful,” she said. “You think London is safe. But it’s not.” Lynne asked practically the same question about Seattle. “Ah, private music,” she said. “Well, don’t let it hurt you.”

III. Fences

It’s perhaps not a surprise that “hurt” is Lynne’s most familiar gear. In Seattle we spoke briefly about her childhood, and she said, “There’s nothing that happened to me in Alabama that wasn’t sad.” But when we met in New York the next week, she seemed eager to talk about her parents and to suggest that her upbringing, despite its sudden, violent end, wasn’t always so tragic.

“I feel very lucky to have had the parents I did,” she told me between sips of wine in a Chelsea trattoria on a blustery late afternoon in November, the day after she performed at the nearby Hiro Ballroom. Lynne seemed aware of the potential controversy of that statement, and the words sounded well aged, as if Lynne had let them breathe for a while before she said them to anyone but herself. But she was quick to defend them. Yes, it’s true she grew up in a town so small it was basically just a ZIP code, and yes, she and her sister, Allison, who is three and a half years younger, had a great appreciation of the country, of creeks and fishing poles and cows and horses and homemade bows and arrows. But they also had a lot of books and music. Her father, Franklin Moorer, was an Auburn University graduate who taught English sometimes and other times was a juvenile-corrections officer, while her mother, Lynn, was a legal secretary. “We were a unit, and we liked it like that,” she said. Music was the stitching. “Mama could sing her butt off,” Lynne said. “Daddy was an O.K. singer, but he was more of a guitar player. Sometimes we’d be on the road and Daddy would just stop the car, get out and play for a while, then we’d keep going.”

Despite his academic credentials, Lynne said, her father was a renegade “who always hated the Man,” and he would disappear on sudden, infrequent jaunts to Mobile. He returned from one of them with Willie Nelson‘s landmark outlaw-country LP, “Willie and Family Live.” “I still remember the day Daddy came home with that record,” she said. “I heard it and knew I wanted to be an outlaw, too.”

It didn’t take her long. She was frequently in trouble at school, she told me, always mouthing off. And as she grew older she started butting heads with her father, who always drank heavily but was now becoming abusive. “Mama was a wreck,” Lynne told me. “She was a gentle soul, sharing, the life of the party . . . but she wasn’t a fighter. I am. I could have been a boxer. I’m still not above it.”

In the summer of 1986, Lynne, then 17, was clashing with her father so much that he had her thrown in jail for reasons she won’t disclose. And when she got out, she tried to think of a way to take her mother and sister out of harm’s way. “Daddy drank a little,” she said, “and I couldn’t have him being mean.” But before she could act, at 5 a.m. on Aug. 12, her father shot her mother and then turned the gun on himself outside the house. Shelby and Allison, who was 14, were inside when it happened. By the time they got outside, she said, “it was done.”

Lynne stops short of analyzing her father’s demons, of trying to explain what made him suddenly turn homicidal. More than 20 years later, she told me, she has wasted too much of her life on the whys and what-ifs, “and it ain’t worth a damn, because in the end things are the way they’re supposed to be.” She has come to forgive her father, and she and her sister, who is now the country singer Allison Moorer, wish that people would let the matter rest. (Moorer declined to be interviewed, citing the ironclad rule that the sisters, who are kind of like the Venus and Serena of pop and country music, have about never doing “crossover” interviews.) “People think we’re in tremendous pain,” Lynne said, “but we want everyone to know that we’re O.K.”

Lynne and Moorer went back to Alabama together in 2002, during Lynne’s timeout, to take care of some property they owned. “It was time for me to build some fences,” she said. She wrote poetry and thought about quitting the music business altogether, but even when she started making records again, she took the best of Alabama with her back to California, where she lives just outside Palm Springs. She gardens, mows her own grass, fixes everything herself, a talent she says she got from her father. “I don’t exercise,” she said, “but I’ll do any kind of manual labor.” When she’s not on the road, a typical Friday night for Lynne means having some friends over for a bottle of wine and playing records, just as the family used to do in Alabama. “I don’t have an iPod,” she said. “I have a computer that I turn on occasionally. I still have all my vinyl. Sissy” — her nickname for Moorer, who lives in New York with her husband, the alt-country singer Steve Earle — “says she has no room in her apartment for records, but I’d keep mine even if I had to sleep on them. You can’t roll a joint on an iPod.”

IV. Wishin’ and Hopin’ and Bringin’ and Takin’

For the first 16 years or so of her life, Dusty Springfield, whose real name was Mary O’Brien, attended convent schools, and when I interviewed her, I asked when she’d last gone to church. “Sometime in the late 60′s,” she said. “I won’t go again until they bring back the Latin Mass. I want the candles, the incense, the whole bloody show.”

Springfield’s records certainly always provided just that, whether they were flooded with klieg-light arrangements or glowed in the more recessed lighting of her “Memphis” era; her voice had all the candles and incense she needed. And that’s what Lynne brought to her concerts in Seattle and New York. Sure, she had the same threadbare combo that plays on the new album, but that just made Lynne sing out more, to get in the face of the melodies and lyrics, to expose every raw nerve. This is probably what she meant by making the kind of album Springfield would have made today.

“I think this is my best record,” she said in Seattle. “Just in the quality of the songs and the singing.” Ramone, who has heard and produced a few good singers in his day, said, “I think this gives Shelby the platform that she’s needed” to finally put across all the facets of her voice. For all her enthusiasm, though, Lynne is measured about the album’s prospects. “I’ve been in this business 20 years and haven’t had a big hit record. And I’m still doing it. In another 20 years, I’ll still be doing it. I wouldn’t trade my life for what Carrie Underwood has. I’ll be 75, and someone will ask me to sing. And I’ll still be cute.”

The audiences in both cities reacted warmly to Lynne’s tribute to Springfield. (Seattle turned out the biggest sea of bald heads I’d seen in a concert hall, perhaps a sign that they knew the music’s provenance.) Even my waiter at the supper-club-like venue, a 33-year-old named Jared, seemed impressed. “I know all these songs,” he said. “My parents listened to them all the time.”

And in the end both evenings became as much about Lynne as about the material. For most of the shows she bowed her head in reverence and kept her patter to a minimum (” ‘Preciate it,” was about all she said after each number, as if any attempt to “entertain” would distract her from the more serious business at hand). Onstage she sang with both a dreamy, faraway lilt and a right-this-second-ness, as she does on the record. But something unexpected happened during the encore, “Wishin’ and Hopin’.” When Springfield recorded the song in 1964, she turned the prefeminist lyric of slavish devotion (“Wear your hair/Just for him”) into a sly, swinging decree of sexual empowerment. Lynne’s version had a similar yoke-loosening. When she got to the line about the hair, she broke from the song and announced, “I don’t wear my hair for anyone.” Then she picked up her head, threw back that hair and unbridled a smile. She was not Dusty Springfield. She was not Carrie Underwood. She was Shelby Lynne. Her new album may or may not break down the fences that have stood between her and the general public, but in that moment, it was clear that Lynne had broken down a few of her own.

Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it’s an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in “I Hate Gates” Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?

Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.

It’s not hard to see why the moral reputations of this trio should be so out of line with the good they have done. Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. Gates is a nerd’s nerd and the world’s richest man, as likely to enter heaven as the proverbial camel squeezing through the needle’s eye. And Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all.

I doubt these examples will persuade anyone to favor Bill Gates over Mother Teresa for sainthood. But they show that our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish. It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks. Illusions are a favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the naïve belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we trust them at other times?). Today, a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense. Moral intuitions are being drawn out of people in the lab, on Web sites and in brain scanners, and are being explained with tools from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary biology.

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them,” wrote Immanuel Kant, “the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” These days, the moral law within is being viewed with increasing awe, if not always admiration. The human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations.

These quirks are bound to have implications for the human predicament. Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings. We seek it in our friends and mates, nurture it in our children, advance it in our politics and justify it with our religions. A disrespect for morality is blamed for everyday sins and history’s worst atrocities. To carry this weight, the concept of morality would have to be bigger than any of us and outside all of us.

So dissecting moral intuitions is no small matter. If morality is a mere trick of the brain, some may fear, our very grounds for being moral could be eroded. Yet as we shall see, the science of the moral sense can instead be seen as a way to strengthen those grounds, by clarifying what morality is and how it should steer our actions.

The Moralization Switch

The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).

The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”

The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”

We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial.

Much of our recent social history, including the culture wars between liberals and conservatives, consists of the moralization or amoralization of particular kinds of behavior. Even when people agree that an outcome is desirable, they may disagree on whether it should be treated as a matter of preference and prudence or as a matter of sin and virtue. Rozin notes, for example, that smoking has lately been moralized. Until recently, it was understood that some people didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral. Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering “punitive damages.”

At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices. They include divorce, illegitimacy, being a working mother, marijuana use and homosexuality. Many afflictions have been reassigned from payback for bad choices to unlucky misfortunes. There used to be people called “bums” and “tramps”; today they are “homeless.” Drug addiction is a “disease”; syphilis was rebranded from the price of wanton behavior to a “sexually transmitted disease” and more recently a “sexually transmitted infection.”

This wave of amoralization has led the cultural right to lament that morality itself is under assault, as we see in the group that anointed itself the Moral Majority. In fact there seems to be a Law of Conservation of Moralization, so that as old behaviors are taken out of the moralized column, new ones are added to it. Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate.

Many of these moralizations, like the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.

Reasoning and Rationalizing

It’s not just the content of our moral judgments that is often questionable, but the way we arrive at them. We like to think that when we have a conviction, there are good reasons that drove us to adopt it. That is why an older approach to moral psychology, led by Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, tried to document the lines of reasoning that guided people to moral conclusions. But consider these situations, originally devised by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt:

Julie is traveling in France on summer vacation from college with her brother Mark. One night they decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. Julie was already taking birth-control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too, just to be safe. They both enjoy the sex but decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel closer to each other. What do you think about that — was it O.K. for them to make love?

A woman is cleaning out her closet and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.

A family’s dog is killed by a car in front of their house. They heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cook it and eat it for dinner.

Most people immediately declare that these acts are wrong and then grope to justify why they are wrong. It’s not so easy. In the case of Julie and Mark, people raise the possibility of children with birth defects, but they are reminded that the couple were diligent about contraception. They suggest that the siblings will be emotionally hurt, but the story makes it clear that they weren’t. They submit that the act would offend the community, but then recall that it was kept a secret. Eventually many people admit, “I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I just know it’s wrong.” People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.

The gap between people’s convictions and their justifications is also on display in the favorite new sandbox for moral psychologists, a thought experiment devised by the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson called the Trolley Problem. On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says “yes.”

Consider now a different scene. You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don’t see it that way: though they would pull the switch in the first dilemma, they would not heave the fat man in the second. When pressed for a reason, they can’t come up with anything coherent, though moral philosophers haven’t had an easy time coming up with a relevant difference, either.

When psychologists say “most people” they usually mean “most of the two dozen sophomores who filled out a questionnaire for beer money.” But in this case it means most of the 200,000 people from a hundred countries who shared their intuitions on a Web-based experiment conducted by the psychologists Fiery Cushman and Liane Young and the biologist Marc Hauser. A difference between the acceptability of switch-pulling and man-heaving, and an inability to justify the choice, was found in respondents from Europe, Asia and North and South America; among men and women, blacks and whites, teenagers and octogenarians, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Jews and atheists; people with elementary-school educations and people with Ph.D.’s.

Joshua Greene, a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist, suggests that evolution equipped people with a revulsion to manhandling an innocent person. This instinct, he suggests, tends to overwhelm any utilitarian calculus that would tot up the lives saved and lost. The impulse against roughing up a fellow human would explain other examples in which people abjure killing one to save many, like euthanizing a hospital patient to harvest his organs and save five dying patients in need of transplants, or throwing someone out of a crowded lifeboat to keep it afloat.

By itself this would be no more than a plausible story, but Greene teamed up with the cognitive neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen and several Princeton colleagues to peer into people’s brains using functional M.R.I. They sought to find signs of a conflict between brain areas associated with emotion (the ones that recoil from harming someone) and areas dedicated to rational analysis (the ones that calculate lives lost and saved).

When people pondered the dilemmas that required killing someone with their bare hands, several networks in their brains lighted up. One, which included the medial (inward-facing) parts of the frontal lobes, has been implicated in emotions about other people. A second, the dorsolateral (upper and outer-facing) surface of the frontal lobes, has been implicated in ongoing mental computation (including nonmoral reasoning, like deciding whether to get somewhere by plane or train). And a third region, the anterior cingulate cortex (an evolutionarily ancient strip lying at the base of the inner surface of each cerebral hemisphere), registers a conflict between an urge coming from one part of the brain and an advisory coming from another.

But when the people were pondering a hands-off dilemma, like switching the trolley onto the spur with the single worker, the brain reacted differently: only the area involved in rational calculation stood out. Other studies have shown that neurological patients who have blunted emotions because of damage to the frontal lobes become utilitarians: they think it makes perfect sense to throw the fat man off the bridge. Together, the findings corroborate Greene’s theory that our nonutilitarian intuitions come from the victory of an emotional impulse over a cost-benefit analysis.

A Universal Morality?

The findings of trolleyology — complex, instinctive and worldwide moral intuitions — led Hauser and John Mikhail (a legal scholar) to revive an analogy from the philosopher John Rawls between the moral sense and language. According to Noam Chomsky, we are born with a “universal grammar” that forces us to analyze speech in terms of its grammatical structure, with no conscious awareness of the rules in play. By analogy, we are born with a universal moral grammar that forces us to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness.

The idea that the moral sense is an innate part of human nature is not far-fetched. A list of human universals collected by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown includes many moral concepts and emotions, including a distinction between right and wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and obligations; proscription of murder, rape and other forms of violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the community; shame; and taboos.

The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress. And according to the psychologists Elliot Turiel and Judith Smetana, preschoolers have an inkling of the difference between societal conventions and moral principles. Four-year-olds say that it is not O.K. to wear pajamas to school (a convention) and also not O.K. to hit a little girl for no reason (a moral principle). But when asked whether these actions would be O.K. if the teacher allowed them, most of the children said that wearing pajamas would now be fine but that hitting a little girl would still not be.

Though no one has identified genes for morality, there is circumstantial evidence they exist. The character traits called “conscientiousness” and “agreeableness” are far more correlated in identical twins separated at birth (who share their genes but not their environment) than in adoptive siblings raised together (who share their environment but not their genes). People given diagnoses of “antisocial personality disorder” or “psychopathy” show signs of morality blindness from the time they are children. They bully younger children, torture animals, habitually lie and seem incapable of empathy or remorse, often despite normal family backgrounds. Some of these children grow up into the monsters who bilk elderly people out of their savings, rape a succession of women or shoot convenience-store clerks lying on the floor during a robbery.

Though psychopathy probably comes from a genetic predisposition, a milder version can be caused by damage to frontal regions of the brain (including the areas that inhibit intact people from throwing the hypothetical fat man off the bridge). The neuroscientists Hanna and Antonio Damasio and their colleagues found that some children who sustain severe injuries to their frontal lobes can grow up into callous and irresponsible adults, despite normal intelligence. They lie, steal, ignore punishment, endanger their own children and can’t think through even the simplest moral dilemmas, like what two people should do if they disagreed on which TV channel to watch or whether a man ought to steal a drug to save his dying wife.

The moral sense, then, may be rooted in the design of the normal human brain. Yet for all the awe that may fill our minds when we reflect on an innate moral law within, the idea is at best incomplete. Consider this moral dilemma: A runaway trolley is about to kill a schoolteacher. You can divert the trolley onto a sidetrack, but the trolley would trip a switch sending a signal to a class of 6-year-olds, giving them permission to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Is it permissible to pull the lever?

This is no joke. Last month a British woman teaching in a private school in Sudan allowed her class to name a teddy bear after the most popular boy in the class, who bore the name of the founder of Islam. She was jailed for blasphemy and threatened with a public flogging, while a mob outside the prison demanded her death. To the protesters, the woman’s life clearly had less value than maximizing the dignity of their religion, and their judgment on whether it is right to divert the hypothetical trolley would have differed from ours. Whatever grammar guides people’s moral judgments can’t be all that universal. Anyone who stayed awake through Anthropology 101 can offer many other examples.

Of course, languages vary, too. In Chomsky’s theory, languages conform to an abstract blueprint, like having phrases built out of verbs and objects, while the details vary, like whether the verb or the object comes first. Could we be wired with an abstract spec sheet that embraces all the strange ideas that people in different cultures moralize?

The Varieties of Moral Experience

When anthropologists like Richard Shweder and Alan Fiske survey moral concerns across the globe, they find that a few themes keep popping up from amid the diversity. People everywhere, at least in some circumstances and with certain other folks in mind, think it’s bad to harm others and good to help them. They have a sense of fairness: that one should reciprocate favors, reward benefactors and punish cheaters. They value loyalty to a group, sharing and solidarity among its members and conformity to its norms. They believe that it is right to defer to legitimate authorities and to respect people with high status. And they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.

The exact number of themes depends on whether you’re a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture. Haidt asks us to consider how much money someone would have to pay us to do hypothetical acts like the following:

Stick a pin into your palm.

Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know. (Harm.)

Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error.

Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.)

Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation.

Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in a foreign nation. (Community.)

Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit.

Slap your minister in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit. (Authority.)

Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like idiots for 30 minutes, including flubbing simple problems and falling down on stage.

Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like animals for 30 minutes, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage. (Purity.)

In each pair, the second action feels far more repugnant. Most of the moral illusions we have visited come from an unwarranted intrusion of one of the moral spheres into our judgments. A violation of community led people to frown on using an old flag to clean a bathroom. Violations of purity repelled the people who judged the morality of consensual incest and prevented the moral vegetarians and nonsmokers from tolerating the slightest trace of a vile contaminant. At the other end of the scale, displays of extreme purity lead people to venerate religious leaders who dress in white and affect an aura of chastity and asceticism.

The Genealogy of Morals

The five spheres are good candidates for a periodic table of the moral sense not only because they are ubiquitous but also because they appear to have deep evolutionary roots. The impulse to avoid harm, which gives trolley ponderers the willies when they consider throwing a man off a bridge, can also be found in rhesus monkeys, who go hungry rather than pull a chain that delivers food to them and a shock to another monkey. Respect for authority is clearly related to the pecking orders of dominance and appeasement that are widespread in the animal kingdom. The purity-defilement contrast taps the emotion of disgust that is triggered by potential disease vectors like bodily effluvia, decaying flesh and unconventional forms of meat, and by risky sexual practices like incest.

The other two moralized spheres match up with the classic examples of how altruism can evolve that were worked out by sociobiologists in the 1960s and 1970s and made famous by Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene.” Fairness is very close to what scientists call reciprocal altruism, where a willingness to be nice to others can evolve as long as the favor helps the recipient more than it costs the giver and the recipient returns the favor when fortunes reverse. The analysis makes it sound as if reciprocal altruism comes out of a robotlike calculation, but in fact Robert Trivers, the biologist who devised the theory, argued that it is implemented in the brain as a suite of moral emotions. Sympathy prompts a person to offer the first favor, particularly to someone in need for whom it would go the furthest. Anger protects a person against cheaters who accept a favor without reciprocating, by impelling him to punish the ingrate or sever the relationship. Gratitude impels a beneficiary to reward those who helped him in the past. Guilt prompts a cheater in danger of being found out to repair the relationship by redressing the misdeed and advertising that he will behave better in the future (consistent with Mencken’s definition of conscience as “the inner voice which warns us that someone might be looking”). Many experiments on who helps whom, who likes whom, who punishes whom and who feels guilty about what have confirmed these predictions.

Community, the very different emotion that prompts people to share and sacrifice without an expectation of payback, may be rooted in nepotistic altruism, the empathy and solidarity we feel toward our relatives (and which evolved because any gene that pushed an organism to aid a relative would have helped copies of itself sitting inside that relative). In humans, of course, communal feelings can be lavished on nonrelatives as well. Sometimes it pays people (in an evolutionary sense) to love their companions because their interests are yoked, like spouses with common children, in-laws with common relatives, friends with common tastes or allies with common enemies. And sometimes it doesn’t pay them at all, but their kinship-detectors have been tricked into treating their groupmates as if they were relatives by tactics like kinship metaphors (blood brothers, fraternities, the fatherland), origin myths, communal meals and other bonding rituals.

Juggling the Spheres

All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture. Many of the flabbergasting practices in faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the other spheres. Think of the Japanese fear of nonconformity (community), the holy ablutions and dietary restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage at insulting the Prophet among Muslims (authority). In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?

The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.

Reassigning an activity to a different sphere, or taking it out of the moral spheres altogether, isn’t easy. People think that a behavior belongs in its sphere as a matter of sacred necessity and that the very act of questioning an assignment is a moral outrage. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think — is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans. Just ask them to think about applying the sphere of reciprocity to relationships customarily governed by community or authority. When Tetlock asked subjects for their opinions on whether adoption agencies should place children with the couples willing to pay the most, whether people should have the right to sell their organs and whether they should be able to buy their way out of jury duty, the subjects not only disagreed but felt personally insulted and were outraged that anyone would raise the question.

The institutions of modernity often question and experiment with the way activities are assigned to moral spheres. Market economies tend to put everything up for sale. Science amoralizes the world by seeking to understand phenomena rather than pass judgment on them. Secular philosophy is in the business of scrutinizing all beliefs, including those entrenched by authority and tradition. It’s not surprising that these institutions are often seen to be morally corrosive.

Is Nothing Sacred?

And “morally corrosive” is exactly the term that some critics would apply to the new science of the moral sense. The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to debunk them. Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested — to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes. The explanation of how different cultures appeal to different spheres could lead to a spineless relativism, in which we would never have grounds to criticize the practice of another culture, no matter how barbaric, because “we have our kind of morality and they have theirs.” And the whole enterprise seems to be dragging us to an amoral nihilism, in which morality itself would be demoted from a transcendent principle to a figment of our neural circuitry.

In reality, none of these fears are warranted, and it’s important to see why not. The first misunderstanding involves the logic of evolutionary explanations. Evolutionary biologists sometimes anthropomorphize DNA for the same reason that science teachers find it useful to have their students imagine the world from the viewpoint of a molecule or a beam of light. One shortcut to understanding the theory of selection without working through the math is to imagine that the genes are little agents that try to make copies of themselves.

Unfortunately, the meme of the selfish gene escaped from popular biology books and mutated into the idea that organisms (including people) are ruthlessly self-serving. And this doesn’t follow. Genes are not a reservoir of our dark unconscious wishes. “Selfish” genes are perfectly compatible with selfless organisms, because a gene’s metaphorical goal of selfishly replicating itself can be implemented by wiring up the brain of the organism to do unselfish things, like being nice to relatives or doing good deeds for needy strangers. When a mother stays up all night comforting a sick child, the genes that endowed her with that tenderness were “selfish” in a metaphorical sense, but by no stretch of the imagination is she being selfish.

Nor does reciprocal altruism — the evolutionary rationale behind fairness — imply that people do good deeds in the cynical expectation of repayment down the line. We all know of unrequited good deeds, like tipping a waitress in a city you will never visit again and falling on a grenade to save platoonmates. These bursts of goodness are not as anomalous to a biologist as they might appear.

In his classic 1971 article, Trivers, the biologist, showed how natural selection could push in the direction of true selflessness. The emergence of tit-for-tat reciprocity, which lets organisms trade favors without being cheated, is just a first step. A favor-giver not only has to avoid blatant cheaters (those who would accept a favor but not return it) but also prefer generous reciprocators (those who return the biggest favor they can afford) over stingy ones (those who return the smallest favor they can get away with). Since it’s good to be chosen as a recipient of favors, a competition arises to be the most generous partner around. More accurately, a competition arises to appear to be the most generous partner around, since the favor-giver can’t literally read minds or see into the future. A reputation for fairness and generosity becomes an asset.

Now this just sets up a competition for potential beneficiaries to inflate their reputations without making the sacrifices to back them up. But it also pressures the favor-giver to develop ever-more-sensitive radar to distinguish the genuinely generous partners from the hypocrites. This arms race will eventually reach a logical conclusion. The most effective way to seem generous and fair, under harsh scrutiny, is to be generous and fair. In the long run, then, reputation can be secured only by commitment. At least some agents evolve to be genuinely high-minded and self-sacrificing — they are moral not because of what it brings them but because that’s the kind of people they are.

Of course, a theory that predicted that everyone always sacrificed themselves for another’s good would be as preposterous as a theory that predicted that no one ever did. Alongside the niches for saints there are niches for more grudging reciprocators, who attract fewer and poorer partners but don’t make the sacrifices necessary for a sterling reputation. And both may coexist with outright cheaters, who exploit the unwary in one-shot encounters. An ecosystem of niches, each with a distinct strategy, can evolve when the payoff of each strategy depends on how many players are playing the other strategies. The human social environment does have its share of generous, grudging and crooked characters, and the genetic variation in personality seems to bear the fingerprints of this evolutionary process.

Is Morality a Figment?

So a biological understanding of the moral sense does not entail that people are calculating maximizers of their genes or self-interest. But where does it leave the concept of morality itself?

Here is the worry. The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

This throws us back to wondering where those reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our brains. They certainly aren’t in the physical world like wavelength or mass. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover. On this analogy, we are born with a rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others. (No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that 2 + 2 = 4.) Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.

Moral realism, as this idea is called, is too rich for many philosophers’ blood. Yet a diluted version of the idea — if not a list of cosmically inscribed Thou-Shalts, then at least a few If-Thens — is not crazy. Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.

One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other’s child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.

The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.

Not coincidentally, the core of this idea — the interchangeability of perspectives — keeps reappearing in history’s best-thought-through moral philosophies, including the Golden Rule (itself discovered many times); Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity; the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter Singer‘s theory of the Expanding Circle — the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings.

Doing Better by Knowing Ourselves

Morality, then, is still something larger than our inherited moral sense, and the new science of the moral sense does not make moral reasoning and conviction obsolete. At the same time, its implications for our moral universe are profound.

At the very least, the science tells us that even when our adversaries’ agenda is most baffling, they may not be amoral psychopaths but in the throes of a moral mind-set that appears to them to be every bit as mandatory and universal as ours does to us. Of course, some adversaries really are psychopaths, and others are so poisoned by a punitive moralization that they are beyond the pale of reason. (The actor Will Smith had many historians on his side when he recently speculated to the press that Hitler thought he was acting morally.) But in any conflict in which a meeting of the minds is not completely hopeless, a recognition that the other guy is acting from moral rather than venal reasons can be a first patch of common ground. One side can acknowledge the other’s concern for community or stability or fairness or dignity, even while arguing that some other value should trump it in that instance. With affirmative action, for example, the opponents can be seen as arguing from a sense of fairness, not racism, and the defenders can be seen as acting from a concern with community, not bureaucratic power. Liberals can ratify conservatives’ concern with families while noting that gay marriage is perfectly consistent with that concern.

The science of the moral sense also alerts us to ways in which our psychological makeup can get in the way of our arriving at the most defensible moral conclusions. The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.

Though wise people have long reflected on how we can be blinded by our own sanctimony, our public discourse still fails to discount it appropriately. In the worst cases, the thoughtlessness of our brute intuitions can be celebrated as a virtue. In his influential essay “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” Leon Kass, former chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, argued that we should disregard reason when it comes to cloning and other biomedical technologies and go with our gut: “We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings . . . because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. . . . In this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done . . . repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”

There are, of course, good reasons to regulate human cloning, but the shudder test is not one of them. People have shuddered at all kinds of morally irrelevant violations of purity in their culture: touching an untouchable, drinking from the same water fountain as a Negro, allowing Jewish blood to mix with Aryan blood, tolerating sodomy between consenting men. And if our ancestors’ repugnance had carried the day, we never would have had autopsies, vaccinations, blood transfusions, artificial insemination, organ transplants and in vitro fertilization, all of which were denounced as immoral when they were new.

There are many other issues for which we are too quick to hit the moralization button and look for villains rather than bug fixes. What should we do when a hospital patient is killed by a nurse who administers the wrong drug in a patient’s intravenous line? Should we make it easier to sue the hospital for damages? Or should we redesign the IV fittings so that it’s physically impossible to connect the wrong bottle to the line?

And nowhere is moralization more of a hazard than in our greatest global challenge. The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.’s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness. Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”

Philippe de Montebello, who has led the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 30 years and has virtually become synonymous with its monumental profile, announced Tuesday that he planned to retire at the end of the year.

A patrician figure whose mellifluous multilingual voice on the museum’s audio guides is known to millions of visitors around the world, he is the eighth and longest-serving director in the institution’s 138-year history.

Mr. de Montebello, 71, has more than doubled the museum’s physical size during his tenure, carving out majestic new galleries suited to the Met’s encyclopedic holdings. Today it is the city’s biggest tourist attraction, with millions of visitors a year.

Mr. de Montebello informed the Met’s board of trustees at a meeting on Tuesday afternoon that he intended to leave the museum at the end of 2008 or as soon as a successor had been found. A new director has not been named, and the board said it would immediately form a search committee.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Montebello said that after a packed fall season and the completion of several big long-term projects like new galleries for Greek and Roman art and European paintings, he felt the time was right.

“After three decades, to stay much further would be to skirt decency,” he said. “This has not been an easy decision — it’s wrenching for me, it’s been my entire life. But it’s time.”

James R. Houghton, chairman of the museum’s board, said he was not surprised by the announcement. “It has been in his mind for some time now,” he said in an interview. “It was a mutual decision and I think the right one.”

Yet he added: “To look for somebody to fill his shoes will be very hard. The pool of potential candidates is smaller than it once was.”

While Mr. de Montebello has won broad admiration for his stewardship of the museum, he has sometimes drawn criticism for a reluctance to embrace contemporary art and a dismissive attitude toward claims by archaeologically rich countries to objects they say were looted and sold to Western museums.

Two years ago, however, he negotiated a pact to turn over 21 classical artifacts in the Met’s collection to Italy. And a dead shark prepared by the artist Damien Hirst is now floating in a tank of formaldehyde at the southern end of the museum under a three-year loan.

Asked if the board, knowing Mr. de Montebello’s retirement was imminent, had drafted a list of possible successors, Mr. Houghton would only say, “We’ve got all sorts of lists.” He declined to describe the qualities that Met trustees would seek in a new director.

(Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, chairman emeritus of The New York Times Company and the father of its current chairman, led the Met’s board of trustees from 1987 to 1998 and is now a trustee emeritus of the museum.)

Mr. Houghton said that Annette de la Renta and S. Parker Gilbert, both vice chairmen of the Met board, would be the chairwoman and vice chairman of the search committee.

Mr. de Montebello said he would not serve on the panel. “I’m the last person to name my successor,” he said. “It’s not my role.”

Mr. de Montebello said he timed his resignation carefully. “It seemed like a good moment — to step down on a high,” he said, referring to 2007 as an “annus mirabilis.”

Last year he oversaw the opening of nine new or renovated galleries, beginning in April with the vast Greek and Roman galleries — a museum within a museum — and ending with the opening of the expanded and renovated galleries for 19th- and early-20th-century European paintings last month. The museum also presented some 21 exhibitions, including “The Age of Rembrandt,” which included the museum’s entire collection of Dutch paintings and attracted 505,082 visitors by the time it closed on Sunday, and “Tapestry in the Baroque,” drawing on collections from more than 15 countries.

Many of those projects were years in the making, with Mr. de Montebello collaborating closely with his curators, seeking financing and negotiating loans.

It has been a long trajectory. He arrived at the Met in 1963 as a curatorial assistant in the department of European paintings and except for four years — from 1969 to 1974, when he served as director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — he spent his entire career there.

His ascension to director in 1977 ended a tumultuous decade at the museum. His predecessor, Thomas Hoving, was a showman who shook up the institution, staging a series of exhibitions that attracted blockbuster crowds. But he was considered an autocrat, and by the end of his tenure had alienated many staff members and trustees.

French born and Harvard educated, Mr. de Montebello exuded a polish and erudition that reassured trustees and donors even as his European style was often spoofed in the art world in his later years.

Over three decades, the institution’s endowment went from $1.36 million to $2.9 billion; attendance rose from 3.5 million to 5.1 million visitors by 2000 before retreating a bit after 9/11. Last year 4.6 million people visited the museum.

Yet Mr. de Montebello became known as much for his absorption in the Met’s permanent collection as for encouraging well-attended shows. Curators say he can often be found in one gallery or another peering at a Greek bust or a studying a piece of richly gilded Byzantine metalwork.

Over the years he has been responsible for championing high-profile acquisitions — some gifts, some purchases, some both — like Duccio di Buoninsegna’s “Madonna and Child,” dating from around 1300; Vermeer‘s “Portrait of a Young Woman,” from around 1666-1667; van Gogh‘s “Wheat Field With Cypresses” (1889); and Jasper Johns‘s “White Flag” (1955).

He also managed to outmaneuver other institutions in securing bequests of entire collections, like world-class Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works amassed by Walter H. Annenberg, the former United States ambassador to Britain and a longtime Met trustee, and his wife, Leonore.

He also motivated donors to finance grand galleries that would show the permanent holdings to better advantage, creating spaces like the 100,000-square-foot Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for modern art, which opened in 1987, and the Carroll and Milton Petrie European Sculpture Court in 1990.

In the 1990s Mr. de Montebello embarked on a series of projects that involved “building from within,” like the new Greek and Roman Galleries and refurbished spaces for Oceanic and Native North American Art. (Other building programs have included the expansion and renovation of the museum’s period rooms and decorative arts galleries; new galleries for prints, drawings and photographs; and vast new spaces for the fast-growing collections of Asian art.)

Two years ago, he initiated a project to redesign the Met’s entire American Wing, including the Charles Engelhard Court, an effort that is still in progress.

In 1989 he halted the Met practice of charging special admission prices for big temporary exhibitions, saying he felt that the fees siphoned attention from the permanent holdings and the full range of art objects at the Met.

Still, he oversaw more than his share of blockbusters, including “The Vatican Collections” in 1983; the Velázquez survey in 1989-1990; “The Glory of Byzantium,” in 1997; “Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids,” in 1999-2000; “Vermeer and the Delft School,” in 2001; and “Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman,” in 2003. His next act, post-Metropolitan Museum, has yet to be determined, Mr. de Montebello said. “I don’t know what’s out there,” he said. “Surely I’d like to be an advocacy for excellence in art.”

He allowed that his current job would be hard to top. “I’m the most grateful person on earth,” he said. “I’ve had the privilege to run the greatest institution in the world. How much luckier can you be than that?”

For the museum world, one challenge will surely be to start seeing the Met and its long-term director as separate entities.

“The Met is a huge organization, and too many people have been increasingly saying to me, ‘You are the Met,’” Mr. de Montebello said. “I am not the Met.”

MANCHESTER, N.H. — New Hampshire kept Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton alive.

Her victory in the Democratic primary on Tuesday night was portrayed by her campaign as a stunning turnabout. Given how dire her situation had appeared just hours earlier, the spin was not unjustified.

In the end, she survived because registered Democrats preferred her to Senator Barack Obama, though independents went for him, according to exit polls. And she benefited from strong support among women, a constituency that she worked hard to appeal to in the campaign’s final days here.

Mrs. Clinton is now likely to be able to appeal to donors for more money for what is shaping up as a protracted battle against Mr. Obama. The internal squabbling about her campaign’s management and strategy is likely to be quieted. And she will no doubt go forth making the obvious comparison: that just like her husband 16 years ago, she is now well positioned to battle her way to the nomination.

But Mrs. Clinton faces an opponent who has lately seemed to embody a movement rather than to be a mere political candidate. He has at times been an elusive target, lifted on the wind of nationwide anti-Washington climate change. She has often seemed to be frustrated in seeking to challenge his level of experience, his consistency, his positions or his electability against a Republican Par-

GUANGZHOU, China — Nearly a decade after some of the most powerful companies in the world — often under considerable criticism and consumer pressure — began an effort to eliminate sweatshop labor conditions in Asia, worker abuse is still commonplace in many of the Chinese factories that supply Western companies, according to labor rights groups.

The groups say some Chinese companies routinely shortchange their employees on wages, withhold health benefits and expose their workers to dangerous machinery and harmful chemicals, like lead, cadmium and mercury.

“If these things are so dangerous for the consumer, then how about the workers?” said Anita Chan, a labor rights advocate who teaches at the Australian National University. “We may be dealing with these things for a short time, but they deal with them every day.”

And so while American and European consumers worry about exposing their children to Chinese-made toys coated in lead, Chinese workers, often as young as 16, face far more serious hazards. Here in the Pearl River Delta region near Hong Kong, for example, factory workers lose or break about 40,000 fingers on the job every year, according to a study published a few years ago by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

Pushing to keep big corporations honest, labor groups regularly smuggle photographs, videos, pay stubs, shipping records and other evidence out of factories that they say violate local law and international worker standards. In 2007, factories that supplied more than a dozen corporations, including Wal-Mart, Disney and Dell, were accused of unfair labor practices, including using child labor, forcing employees to work 16-hour days on fast-moving assembly lines, and paying workers less than minimum wage. (Minimum wage in this part of China is about 55 cents an hour.)

In recent weeks, a flood of reports detailing labor abuse have been released, at a time when China is still coping with last year’s wave of product safety recalls of goods made in China, and as it tries to change workplace rules with a new labor law that took effect on Jan. 1.

No company has come under as harsh a spotlight as Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, which sourced about $9 billion in goods from China in 2006, everything from hammers and toys to high-definition televisions.

In December, two nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, documented what they said were abuse and labor violations at 15 factories that produce or supply goods for Wal-Mart — including the use of child labor at Huanya Gifts, a factory here in Guangzhou that makes Christmas tree ornaments.

Wal-Mart officials say they are investigating the allegations, which were in a report issued three weeks ago by the National Labor Committee, a New York-based NGO.

Guangzhou labor bureau officials said they recently fined Huanya for wage violations, but also said they found no evidence of child labor.

A spokesman for Huanya, which employs 8,000 workers, denied that the company broke any labor laws.

But two workers interviewed outside Huanya’s huge complex in late December said that they were forced to work long hours to meet production quotas in harsh conditions.

“I work on the plastic molding machine from 6 in the morning to 6 at night,” said Xu Wenquan, a tiny, baby-faced 16-year-old whose hands were covered with blisters. Asked what had happened to his hands, he replied, the machines are “quite hot, so I’ve burned my hands.”

His brother, Xu Wenjie, 18, said the two young men left their small village in impoverished Guizhou Province four months ago and traveled more than 500 miles to find work at Huanya.

The brothers said they worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, for $120 to $200 a month, far less than they are required to be paid by law.

When government inspectors visit the factory, the young brothers are given the day off, they said.

A former Huanya employee who was reached by telephone gave a similar account of working conditions, saying many workers suffered from skin rashes after working with gold powders and that others were forced to sign papers “volunteering” to work overtime.

“It’s quite noisy, and you stand up all day, 12 hours, and there’s no air-conditioning,” he said. “We get paid by the piece we make but they never told us how much. Sometimes I got $110, sometimes I got $150 a month.”

In its 58-page report, the National Labor Committee scolded Wal-Mart for not doing more to protect workers. The group charged that last July, Huanya recruited about 500 16-year-old high school students to work seven days a week, often 15 hours a day, during peak production months for holiday merchandise.

Several students interviewed at the Guangzhou Technical School, less than two miles from Huanya, confirmed that classmates ages 16 to 18 had spent the summer working at the factory.

Some high school students later went on strike to protest the harsh conditions, the report said. The students also told labor officials that at least seven children, as young as 12 years old, were working in the factory.

“At Wal-Mart, Christmas ornaments are cheap, and so are the lives of the young workers in China who make them,” the National Labor Committee report said.

Jonathan Dong, a Wal-Mart spokesman in Beijing, said the company would soon release details of its own investigation into working conditions at Huanya.

Labor rights groups have also criticized Disney and Dell. Officials of Disney and Dell declined to comment on specific allegations, but both companies say they carefully monitor factories in China and take action when they find problems or unfair labor practices.

“The Walt Disney Company and its affiliates take claims of unfair labor practices very seriously and investigates any such allegations thoroughly,” the company said in a statement. “We have a strong commitment to the safety and well-being of workers, and fair and just labor standards.”

Many multinationals were harshly criticized in the 1990s for using suppliers that maintained sweatshop conditions. Iconic brand names, like Nike, Mattel and Gap, responded by forming corporate social responsibility operations and working with contractors to create a system of factory audits and inspections. Those changes have won praise in some quarters for improving worker conditions.

But despite spending millions of dollars and hiring thousands of auditors, some companies acknowledge that many of the programs are flawed.

“The factories have improved immeasurably over the past few years,” says Alan Hassenfeld, chairman of the toy maker Hasbro and co-chairman of Care, the ethical-manufacturing program of the International Council of Toy Industries. “But let me be honest: there are some bad factories. We have bribery and corruption occurring but we are doing our best.”

Some factories are warned about audits beforehand and some factory owners or managers bribe auditors. Inexperienced inspectors may also be a problem.

Some major Western auditing firms working in China even hire college students from the United States to work during the summer as inspectors, an indication that they are not willing to invest in more expensive or sophisticated auditing programs, critics say.

Chinese suppliers regularly outsource to other suppliers, who may in turn outsource to yet another operation, creating a supply chain that is hard to follow — let alone inspect.

“The convoluted supply chain is probably one of the most underestimated and unrecognized risks in China,” says Dane Chamorro, general manager for Greater China at Control Risks, a risk-consulting firm. “You really have to have experienced people on the ground who know what they’re doing and know the language.”

Many labor experts say part of the problem is cost: Western companies are constantly pressing their Chinese suppliers for lower prices while also insisting that factory owners spend more to upgrade operations, treat workers properly and improve product quality.

At the same time, rising food, energy and raw material costs in China — as well as a shortage of labor in the biggest southern manufacturing zones — are hampering factory owners’ ability to make a profit.

The situation may get worse before it improves. The labor law that took effect on Jan. 1 makes it more difficult to dismiss workers and creates a whole new set of laws that experts say will almost certainly increase labor costs. Yet it may become more difficult for human rights groups to investigate abuses. Concerned about the growing array of threats to profitability, as well as embarrassing exposés, factories are heightening security, harassing labor rights groups and calling the police when journalists show up at their gates.

At the center of the problem is a labor system that relies on young migrant workers, who often leave small rural villages for two- or three-year stints at factories, where they hope to earn enough to return home to start families.

As long as life in the cities promises more money than in rural areas, they will brave the harsh conditions in factories in this and other Chinese cities. And as long as China outlaws independent unions and proves unable to enforce its own labor rules, there is little hope for change.

“This is a problem that has been difficult to solve,” Liu Kaiming, the director of the Institute on Contemporary Observation, which aids migrant workers in nearby Shenzhen, said of sweatshop labor. “China has too many factories. The workers’ bargaining position is weak and the government’s regulation is slack.”

There is little that any Western company can do about those issues, no matter how seriously they take corporate social responsibility — other than leaving China.

The unemployment rate surged to 5 percent in December as the economy added a meager 18,000 jobs, the smallest monthly increase in four years, the Labor Department reported on Friday.

Economists viewed the report as the most powerful indication to date that the United States could well be falling into a recessionary downturn. Evidence of widening unemployment heightened anticipation that the Federal Reserve would further cut interest rates this month, perhaps by an unusually large half a percentage point, in a bid to prevent the economy from sliding into the muck.

“This is unambiguously negative,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “The economy is on the edge of recession, if we’re not already engulfed in one.”

A recession is typically defined as an extended period of at least several months during which economic activity shrinks and unemployment rises.

The swift deterioration in the job market resonated as a warning sign that troubles once confined to real estate and construction are spilling into the broader economy, threatening the ability of American consumers to keep spending with customary abandon.

On Wall Street, the report led to a big sell-off that sent the Dow Jones industrial average plunging nearly 2 percent.

As the presidential race heated up, Democrats seized upon the bleak job numbers to indict Republican-led economic policies. “This morning’s jobs report confirms what most Americans already knew,” Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, said in a statement. “President Bush’s economic policies have failed our country’s middle class.”

President Bush cautioned that “we can’t take economic growth for granted” and said he would work with Congress to be “more diligent” on protecting the economy. Speaking to reporters at the White House after a meeting with his economic advisers, Mr. Bush warned that “the worst thing the Congress could do is raise taxes on the American people.”

The lone consolation for investors, workers and the public at large was that the bad news seemed severe enough to prod the Fed to push its benchmark rate below its current 4.25 percent when policy makers meet at the end of the month. Lower interest rates decrease borrowing costs and encourage banks to lend more freely, spurring spending, hiring and investment.

The Fed has already eased rates three times since September in a bid to inject confidence into jittery markets. But analysts cautioned that central bankers may now feel constrained against further easing: inflation is growing, particularly as oil hovers near $100 a barrel. Lower interest rates, over time, can generate the seeds of inflation, and could make an already weak dollar worth less against foreign currencies.

“The Fed is trying to juggle a two-sided sword,” said Ryan Larson, senior equity trader at Voyageur Asset Management. “They’re trying to fight inflation moving higher and they’re trying to fight a slowdown in growth.”

In an effort to encourage lending, the Fed has been pumping cash through the banking system by auctioning off loans at discounted rates. On Friday, it said it would expand a pair of auctions scheduled for this month, offering $30 billion.

Some economists said the markets and other analysts were making too much of a lone jobs report that could yet be revised.

“The stock and bond markets are going into panic mode,” said Michael Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners, a research and trading firm in Greenwich, Conn. “We’re going to have a slowdown, but I don’t think we’re going to have a recession.”

While filings for jobless benefits have been rising in recent weeks, the pace has not been swift enough to justify such a sharp jump in the unemployment rate, Mr. Darda added.

For months, the economy had managed to grow vigorously despite worrying developments, from the unraveling of the housing industry to turmoil in the credit markets. Through it all, economists marveled at the resilience of the labor market, suggesting that as long as the economy kept creating jobs by the tens of thousands each month, Americans would keep spending and growth would carry on.

But the jobs report for December suggested that the negatives dogging the economy finally appear to be dragging it down.

“There’s no mystery as to why the unemployment rate went up,” said Robert A. Barbera, chief economist at the research firm ITG. “The mystery is why it took so long.”

December’s addition of 18,000 jobs to nonfarm payrolls was an abrupt drop from the 115,000 created in November — a figure revised on Friday from an initial estimate of 94,000. It put the annual rate of job growth at its lowest since 2004.

Some areas of the economy continued to expand, according to the report. Government jobs grew, and health care added 28,000 jobs. Food services added 27,000.

But that growth was largely reversed by pain elsewhere. Retailing lost 24,000 jobs in December. Financial services lost 7,000. Construction shed another 49,000 jobs. Even commercial construction, which some have suggested could compensate for woes among home builders, lost 17,000 jobs. Over all, private sector jobs slid by 13,000.

Despite a weak dollar, which has helped compensate for disappointment at home by lifting American sales abroad, the nation shed 31,000 manufacturing jobs in December.

For the third consecutive month, wages grew slower than the pace of inflation, cutting into the real income of many workers. Among rank-and-file workers, who make up more than four-fifths of the labor force, average hourly earnings rose 3.7 percent last year, below the 4.3 percent rise in 2006.

Job growth has been slowing steadily for two years. In 2005, the economy generated 212,000 new jobs a month, according to the Labor Department. Last year, the pace dropped to 122,000.

The spike in the unemployment rate, which was 4.7 percent in November, suggested that the deterioration of the job market is now accelerating.

Last year, companies fretted about business prospects amid falling housing prices and tightening credit. Many stopped hiring, but large-scale layoffs were rare. But now, some appear to have concluded that they can no longer tough it out.

“December’s bleak jobs report represents the siren call that this business cycle is just about over,” declared Bernard Baumohl, managing director at the Economic Outlook Group, in a note to clients. “We’re about to tilt over to the other side of the economic curve and begin the downsizing.”

In Penacook, N.H., the tilt came during the Christmas season: Riverside Millwork, a supplier of windows, doors and stair parts, laid off 43 people. That added to a wave of layoffs that has winnowed the staff from 225 to 40 since October 2005, when home building began its decline.

“We’ve cut just about everything that we can possibly cut,” said Larry Byer, the company’s human resource manager. “When you don’t have assets to sell or to keep you going, the bodies have to go.”

In calculating the rate of job growth, the Labor Department relies upon a sampling of payroll data and an extrapolation of how many jobs have been created and destroyed. An accompanying survey of households, used to calculate the unemployment rate, presented an even bleaker picture, showing that the number of Americans saying they were working plunged by 436,000 in December — the worst number in five years.

The trend was pronounced for teenagers, blacks and Hispanics, with unemployment among those groups jumping 0.6 percentage point, triple the increase for whites.

The household survey is notoriously volatile and treated with skepticism. But unlike the payroll data, it is not subject to revision, other than for seasonal factors, making it a better indicator when the economy is on the cusp of change, Mr. Barbera said.

Between December 2005 and December 2006, the household survey showed jobs increasing by 2.2 percent. Over the last year, jobs grew less than 0.2 percent.

“Every time we’ve gotten down to this level since 1956, there’s been a recession,” Mr. Barbera said.

The risk is that the weakening job market will swell from a symptom of malaise to a cause. As fewer jobs are created, spending power could dry up. Faced with declining business, employers could further trim payrolls. As unemployment grows, more homeowners could fall behind on mortgages, leading to more losses at banks, and more layoffs.

“The risk of a vicious cycle setting in now is very high,” Mr. Zandi said. “The job market’s operating at stall speed. Either it picks up soon or it quickly unravels.”

The posse appears to be gaining ground on Roger Clemens.

On Friday, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform announced that it would hold hearings to clarify information contained in the report by George J. Mitchell on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Some of that information has been challenged by Clemens.

On Jan. 15, Commissioner Bud Selig; Donald Fehr, the executive director of the players union; and Mitchell, a former senator, are scheduled to appear before the committee. Brian McNamee, Kirk Radomski, Andy Pettitte, Chuck Knoblauch and Clemens have been asked to appear a day later. Lawyers for Clemens and McNamee, the trainer who told Mitchell’s investigators that he injected Clemens multiple times with steroids and human growth hormone, said their clients intended to appear.

Who will ever forget the last Congressional circus? There was Mark McGwire not wanting to talk about the past; Rafael Palmeiro swearing up and down that he never, ever used steroids; and Sammy Sosa suddenly unable to speak or understand English.

Will Clemens tell the truth, or nibble at the edges? Perhaps he’ll show up and speak in tongues.

That’s what he has been doing for the last few days in response to McNamee’s eyewitness account that Clemens used performance-enhancing drugs.

In a video two weeks ago, Clemens said McNamee did not inject him with steroids and human growth hormone. On Thursday, Clemens fine-tuned his denial. According to a news release about Clemens’s interview with “60 Minutes” that will be broadcast Sunday, he told Mike Wallace that McNamee had injected him with a painkiller and with vitamin B12. Sounds like the Barry Bonds overshift.

Critics rolled their eyes when Bonds said he thought he had received flaxseed oil from his trainer. “Of course he knew,” critics said. “How could he not know?” Bonds was under oath before a grand jury when he made his statements. Clemens is using the same rationale. Are we rolling our eyes now?

These Congressional hearings are fine but, with all due respect to the House of Representatives, I’d like to know the complex legal reasons the superagent Jeff Novitzky is not on a plane to Katy, Tex., to pay a visit to Clemens.

Novitzky is the I.R.S. agent whose dogged pursuit brought down some of the world’s finest athletes. He has been particularly tenacious in pursuing Bonds. He has been described as a methodical investigator and compared to Eliot Ness. He reportedly sifts through garbage in pursuit of an indictment.

He helped bring down Marion Jones and has Bonds facing perjury charges. Jones, who pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents, gave back her five Olympic medals and faces sentencing next week.

Now that Clemens has emerged as the defiant whale of baseball’s steroid scandal, why isn’t Novitzky, or another federal agent, hot on the trail? Why isn’t Novitzky pounding on Clemens’s door, saying, “Let’s talk”?

Once Clemens is engaged by a federal agent, his words would assume a new meaning. He will be obliged to tell the truth or face the type of legal liability that ultimately brought down Jones: lying to a federal agent.

Why are federal agents reluctant to pursue Clemens, who is, after all, challenging a government-produced witness? McNamee signed an agreement with federal prosecutors, promising to tell the truth in exchange for not facing criminal charges.

In an e-mail message, the United States attorney’s office in San Francisco, which prosecuted the Balco case with help from Novitzky’s evidence, had no comment.

“The discretion in enforcing false statements given to government officials is very broad and therein lies the inconsistency,” said José F. Anderson, a professor of law at the University of Baltimore, who specializes in litigation and was a former public defender. “How long will it be before someone decides there is enough to bring Clemens into the criminal justice process?”

The larger question for everyone in baseball should be: How do we end this nightmare?

The integrity of a multibillion-dollar baseball industry has been compromised. The greatest hitter, the greatest pitcher and so many players in between have been implicated in a scandal.

“At the end of the day, you had a whole industry that perjured itself by looking the other way,” Anderson said.

Referring to Bonds, he added: “You’re trying one man as a symbol for all the offenses of the others. You’re picking and choosing among the guilty who will be punished.”

Mitchell himself has suggested that baseball should move on. But for that to happen, everyone involved has to give up something, and I’m not sure that can happen. Prosecutors have to give up some of the glory, baseball has to accept a permanent stain, Selig must climb off his high horse. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens will be judged by the court of public opinion.

“Everybody’s got to kick in a piece, everybody’s got to ante up,” Anderson said.

I’d still like to see Novitzky board that plane to Katy, Tex.

LOS ANGELES — The high-definition DVD war is all but over.

Hollywood’s squabble over which of two technologies will replace standard DVDs skewed in the direction of the Sony Corporation on Friday, with Warner Brothers casting the deciding vote in favor of the company’s Blu-ray discs over the rival format, HD DVD.

In some ways, the fight is a replay of the VHS versus Betamax battle of the 1980s. This time, however, the Sony product appears to have prevailed.

“The overwhelming industry opinion is that this decides the format battle in favor of Blu-ray,” said Richard Doherty, research director at the Envisioneering Group, a market research firm in Seaford, N.Y.

Behind the studio’s decision are industrywide fears about the sagging home entertainment market, which has bruised the movie industry in recent years as piracy, competition from video games and the Internet, and soaring costs have cut into profitability. Analysts predict that domestic DVD sales fell by nearly 3 percent in 2007, partly because of confusion in the marketplace over the various formats.

HD DVD, however, is not dead. Two major studios, Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures, have deals in place to continue releasing their movies exclusively on HD DVD, as does DreamWorks Animation. Warner Brothers, part of Time Warner, will also continue to release its titles on both formats until the end of May.

But by supporting Blu-ray, Warner Brothers, the largest player in the $42 billion global home entertainment market, makes it next to impossible for HD DVD to recover the early momentum it achieved.

While the specifics of the Blu-ray and HD DVD skirmish might be of interest only to insiders, the consequences of deciding a winner are not. Consumers have been largely sitting on the sidelines, waiting to buy high-definition players until they see which will have the most titles available. Retailers have been complaining about having to devote space to three kinds of DVDs. And the movie business has delayed tapping a lucrative new market worth billions. High-definition discs sell for a 25 percent premium.

“Consolidating into one format is something that we felt was necessary for the health of the industry,” Barry M. Meyer, the chief executive of Warner Brothers, said in a telephone interview. “The window of opportunity for high-definition DVD could be missed if format confusion continues to linger.”

In addition to Sony, a consortium of other electronics makers back Blu-ray. For Sony, Warner’s decision is a chance to rewrite history: the company faltered in its introduction of Betamax in the consumer market in the 1980s. Many analysts say the HD DVD players now risk becoming the equivalent of Betamax machines, which died out in large part because it became harder for consumers to find Betamax movies as studios shifted allegiance to VHS.

With Warner on board, Blu-ray now has about 70 percent of the market locked up; Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Lionsgate and, of course, Sony are all on Blu-ray’s team. Warner Brothers has some of the bigger releases in 2008, including “Speed Racer,” the Batman sequel “The Dark Knight” and the sixth Harry Potter installment.

“This doesn’t necessarily kill the HD DVD format, but it definitely deals it a severe blow,” said Paul Erickson, an analyst at the NPD Group’s DisplaySearch. “When a consumer asks a store clerk which format to buy, that clerk is now going to have a hard time arguing for HD DVD.”

In a prepared statement, Toshiba said it was “quite surprised” and “particularly disappointed” by Warner’s decision. “We will assess the potential impact of this announcement with the other HD DVD partner companies,” the company said. Universal Pictures declined to comment.

Warner Brothers has been courted for months by both sides. Toshiba dispatched Yoshihide Fujii, the executive in charge of its HD DVD business, to the studio three times in recent months, according to Time Warner executives who were granted anonymity because the negotiations were confidential. Sony has aimed even higher: Howard Stringer, the conglomerate’s chief executive, has leaned on Jeffrey Bewkes, the new chief executive of Time Warner.

Money was an issue. Toshiba offered to pay Warner Brothers substantial incentives to come down on its side — just as it gave Paramount and DreamWorks Animation a combined $150 million in financial incentives for their business, according to two executives with knowledge of the talks who asked not to be identified.

Kevin Tsujihara, president of the Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Group, declined to comment on whether any payments were offered for support of Blu-ray. “This market is absolutely critical to our future growth,” he said in a telephone interview. “You couldn’t put a number on that.”

For his part, Mr. Meyer said, “We’re not in this for a short-term financial hit.”

Which high-definition technology is better has been the subject of intense debate in Hollywood and electronics circles for years. HD DVD players have been much cheaper than Blu-ray machines, but Blu-ray discs have more storage space and more advanced protections against piracy. Both versions deliver sharp resolution.

Consumers were inundated with marketing from both sides during the recent holiday season. Wal-Mart, as part of a temporary promotion, offered Toshiba players for under $100. Sony and its retailing partners, including Best Buy, responded by dropping prices on Blu-ray players, although not to the same level. Blu-ray players can now be purchased for under $300.

Still, Blu-ray was emerging as a front-runner as early as August. Blu-ray titles have sharply outsold HD DVD offerings — by as much 2 to 1, according to some analysts — and some retailers like Target started stocking only Blu-ray players. Blockbuster said last summer that it would carry Blu-ray exclusively.

“We’ve been monitoring the situation with consumers for a while now and they have clearly made their choice,” Mr. Meyer said. “We followed.”

My Christmas story — the one I’ve been telling and retelling these last 10 days — began on Friday, Dec. 21.

It was early in the morning, and I had awoken with the sudden, sinking realization that a present I had bought for one of my sons hadn’t yet arrived. It wasn’t just any present either; it was a PlayStation 3, a $500 item, and a gift, I happened to know from my sources, that he was hoping for.

Like most things I buy online, the PlayStation had come from Amazon.com. So I went to the site and tracked the package — something, thankfully, that is a snap to do on Amazon. What I saw made my heart sink: the package had not only been shipped, it had been delivered to my apartment building days earlier and signed for by one of my neighbors. I knocked on my neighbor’s door, and asked if she still had the PlayStation. No, she said; after signing for it, she had put it downstairs in the hallway.

Now I was nearly distraught. In all likelihood, the reason I hadn’t seen the package earlier in the week is because it had been stolen, probably by someone delivering something else to the building. Even if that wasn’t the case, the one thing I knew for sure was that it was gone — for which I could hardly blame Amazon.

Nonetheless, I got on the phone with an Amazon customer service representative, and explained what had happened: the PlayStation had been shipped, delivered and signed for. It just didn’t wind up in my hands. Would Amazon send me a replacement? In my heart of hearts, I knew I didn’t have a leg to stand on. I was pleading for mercy.

I shudder to think how this entreaty would have gone over at, say, Apple, where customer service is an oxymoron. But the Amazon customer service guy didn’t blink. After assuring himself that I had never actually touched or seen the PlayStation, he had a replacement on the way before the day was out. It arrived on Christmas Eve. Amazon didn’t even charge me for the shipping. My son was very happy. So, of course, was I.

It has been years since I looked in on Amazon. Once upon a time, of course, it was a highflying Internet stock, one of the handful of Internet companies — along with Yahoo, eBay and AOL —whose stock only seemed to go in one direction: up. Henry Blodget made his bones, in no small part, by being a screaming Amazon bull.

Then came the bust, and Wall Street began to see Amazon in a decidedly different light. It was just another retailer, the bears said, that happened to sell goods online — and had immense, unanticipated infrastructure and technology costs. Its founder and chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, spent huge sums of money on such “frills” as free shipping, which depressed its operating margins. Indeed, those margins — which got as low as 3 percent — were more akin to Wal-Mart‘s than that of a big-time tech company. At one point, in mid-2000, a bond analyst named Ravi Suria made his bones by predicting that the company could run out of cash. The stock dropped into single digits.

So when I looked up Amazon’s stock price after my little Christmas miracle, I was amazed to see that it had risen around 140 percent last year. (It closed yesterday at $88.79.) The company grew somewhere around 35 percent in 2007 (the final numbers aren’t in yet), with revenue likely to come in around $15 billion, and well over $1 billion in free cash flow. Its margins had risen to around 6 percent, and it consistently made money.

When I spoke to analysts and investors, they had all kinds of reasons for Amazon’s performance last year. “They finally reached a point where their R&D spending was not expanding as fast as their revenues,” said Citigroup‘s Mark S. Mahaney. He and others also talked about Amazon’s success in international markets, its fast-growing (and high margin) merchant market, which allows merchants to sell goods alongside Amazon, and its rapidly expanding Web services business. Mostly, though, the investing community pointed to those healthier margins as the main reason for the stock’s run-up. Legg Mason‘s legendary fund manager, Bill Miller, who has made a small fortune for his investors by betting big on Amazon, told me that “Wall Street is almost fanatically focused on margin expansion and contraction.”

But I couldn’t help wondering if maybe there wasn’t something else at play here, something Wall Street never seems to take very seriously. Maybe, just maybe, taking care of customers is something worth doing when you are trying to create a lasting company. Maybe, in fact, it’s the best way to build a real business — even if it comes at the expense of short-term results.

It is almost impossible to read or see an interview with Mr. Bezos in which he doesn’t, at some point, begin to wax on about what he likes to call “the customer experience.” Just a few months ago, for instance, he appeared on Charlie Rose‘s talk show to tout Amazon’s new e-book device, the Kindle. Toward the end of the program, Mr. Rose asked the chief executive an open-ended question about how he spent his time, and Mr. Bezos responded with a soliloquy about his “obsession” with customers.

“They care about having the lowest prices, having vast selection, so they have choice, and getting the products to customers fast,” he said. “And the reason I’m so obsessed with these drivers of the customer experience is that I believe that the success we have had over the past 12 years has been driven exclusively by that customer experience. We are not great advertisers. So we start with customers, figure out what they want, and figure out how to get it to them.”

Anybody who has spent any time around Mr. Bezos knows that this is not just some line he throws out for public consumption. It has been the guiding principle behind Amazon since it began. “Jeff has been focused on the customer since Day 1,” said Suresh Kotha, a management professor at the University of Washington business school who has written several case studies about Amazon. Mr. Miller noted that Amazon has really had only one stated goal since it began: to be the most customer-centric company in the world.

In this, it has largely succeeded. Millions of people instinctively go to Amazon when they want to buy something online because they have come to trust the company in a way they trust few other online entities. Amazon’s technology, its interface, its one-click buying service — they are all incredibly easy to use. Its algorithms offer “suggestions” for further buying that actually appeal to its customers. Its Amazon Prime program — for a $79 annual fee you get two-day free shipping — is enormously popular. Unlike what happens at certain other technology companies, when you have a problem, the customer service telephone number isn’t hard to find. It is even willing to correct mistakes that it didn’t make, as I discovered over Christmas.

All of this, however, comes at a price. Indeed, as I’ve written before, customer service isn’t cheap. Certainly, a fair amount of the hundreds of millions of dollars Amazon has spent on R&D has gone toward developing, say, the Kindle, but a good deal of it has also gone toward improving the customer experience. Amazon is willing to lose money on some of its most popular items, like the latest Harry Potter novel. And even with Amazon Prime, it must surely swallow millions of dollars in shipping costs. Indeed, in a presentation to analysts in late November, the company’s chief financial officer, Thomas J. Szkutak, showed one slide that read, “Over $600 Million in Forgone Shipping Revenue.” And that was just for one year.

Wall Street, however, has never placed much value in Mr. Bezos’ emphasis on customers. What he has viewed as money well spent — building customer loyalty — many investors saw as giving away money that should have gone to the bottom line. “What makes their core business so compelling is that they are focused on everything the customer wants,” said Scott W. Devitt, who follows Amazon for Stifel Nicolaus & Company. “When you act in that manner many times Wall Street doesn’t appreciate it.” What Wall Street wanted from Amazon is what it always wants: short-term results. That is precisely what Dell tried to give investors when it scrimped on customer service and what eBay did when it heaped new costs on its most dedicated sellers. Eventually, these short-sighted decisions caught up with both companies.

But Mr. Bezos refused to give in. “He was spending his time on long-term value creation,” Mr. Miller said. There aren’t many chief executives who can so easily ignore the entreaties of the investment community, but Mr. Bezos turned out to be one of them. Of course it helps that he owns over 100 million shares of the stock — and is the company’s single largest shareholder.

And it also helps that his dogged pursuit of a better customer experience has turned out to be exactly right. Yes, it’s true that its international business has been growing rapidly, but that’s not the only reason Amazon is back in high-growth mode. Amazon says it has somewhere on the order of 72 million active customers, who, in the last quarter, were spending an average of $184 a year on the site. That’s up from $150 or so the year before. Amazon’s return customer business is off the charts. According to Forrester Research, 52 percent of people who shop online say they do their product research on Amazon. That is an astounding number.

There is simply no question that Mr. Bezos’s obsession with his customers — and the long term — has paid off, even if he had to take some hits to the stock price along the way. Surely, it was worth it. As for me, the $500 favor the company did for me this Christmas will surely rebound in additional business down the line. Why would I ever shop anywhere else online? Then again, there may be another reason good customer service makes sense. “Jeff used to say that if you did something good for one customer, they would tell 100 customers,” Mr. Kotha said.

I guess that’s what I just did.

LOS ANGELES — Britney Spears was strapped to a gurney late Thursday night after a three-hour standoff involving her two toddler sons, Kevin Federline, a court-appointed child monitor, police officers, paramedics and a locked bathroom door. She was rolled out of her home in the hills near Mulholland Drive as photographers swarmed and helicopters hovered, and taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center “for her own welfare,” as one police spokeswoman put it.

In plain terms, Ms. Spears was in lockdown on a 72-hour involuntary psychiatric hold for treatment and evaluation, the authorities said later, speaking on condition of anonymity because of federal privacy laws. And by Friday afternoon she’d been stripped of the right even to visit with her sons.

Thursday’s ordeal came at the end of a day that began with Ms. Spears showing up for barely a quarter-hour of a scheduled two-hour deposition in her custody fight with Mr. Federline, her ex-husband. He had been given temporary full custody of their sons, Sean Preston, 2, and Jayden, 1, and was seeking to make it permanent.

Ms. Spears, 26, whose personal life has doubtless made more money for the celebrity tabloids, news shows and Web sites than she ever made as a singer, spent time with the boys later in the day and was scheduled to return them to Mr. Federline’s bodyguard at 7 p.m. at her home in the Summit, a gated enclave of multimillion-dollar homes just off Mulholland where it meets Coldwater Canyon Drive.

But after the court-appointed monitor had already put the older boy in the car, Ms. Spears barricaded herself in a bathroom with Jayden and refused to come out, according to a member of Mr. Federline’s camp.

The police arrived at 8, and, The Los Angeles Times reported, a police supervisor said Ms. Spears had been “incoherent and arguing with officers in a way that made no sense.”

Paramedics arrived about 10:30, and Ms. Spears was taken from her home before 11 as photographers mobbed the scene, peering through the ambulance windows to snap shots that circulated on the Internet showing Ms. Spears smiling as if posing one instant, appearing distraught and disheveled the next.

Her son Sean Preston was turned over to Mr. Federline at her home, but Jayden was returned to his father at the hospital after the boy had been taken there in a second ambulance. It was unclear if he was treated or for what. Outside the hospital, meanwhile, fame-seekers and flamboyant fans gathered like fireflies, expressing hope that her downward spiral be brought to a halt before she winds up like Anna Nicole Smith.

By Friday afternoon, Mr. Federline’s lawyer, Mark Vincent Kaplan, had persuaded Commissioner Scott Gordon of Los Angeles Superior Court, who is overseeing the custody fight, to award Mr. Federline sole legal and physical custody of their children and to suspend Ms. Spears’s visitation rights, a court spokeswoman said. A hearing is set for Jan. 14. Ms. Spears’s lawyer, Sorrell Trope, said he ultimately expected her to regain shared custody of the boys.

In cubicles across the country, lunchtime has become the new prime time, as workers click aside their spreadsheets to watch videos on YouTube, news highlights on CNN.com or other Web offerings.

The trend — part of a broader phenomenon known as video snacking — is turning into a growth business for news and media companies, which are feeding the lunch crowd more fresh content.

In some offices, workers coordinate their midday Web-watching schedules, the better to shout out punch lines to one another across rows of desks. Some people gravitate to sites where they can reliably find Webcasts of a certain length — say, a three-minute political wrap-up — to minimize both their mouse clicks and the sandwich crumbs that wind up in the keyboard.

“Go take a walk around your office” at lunchtime, said Alan Wurtzel, head of research for NBC. “Out of 20 people, I’m going to guarantee that 5 are going to be on some sort of site that is not work-related.”

The midday spike in Web traffic is not a new phenomenon, but media companies have started responding in a meaningful way over the last year. They are creating new shows, timing the posts to coincide with hunger pangs. And they are rejiggering the way they sell advertising online, recognizing that noontime programs can command a premium.

In 2007, a growing number of local television stations, including WNCN in Raleigh, N.C., and WCMH in Columbus, Ohio, began producing noon programming exclusively for the Web. Among newspapers, The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, Va., and The Ventura County Star in California started posting videos at lunchtime that have young journalists as hosts and are meant to appeal to 18- to 34-year-old audiences.

The trend has swept across large as well as small independent sites. Yahoo‘s daily best-of-the-Web segment, called The 9 and sponsored by Pepsi, is produced every morning in time for lunch. At MyDamnChannel.com, a showcase for offbeat videos, programmers have been instructed to promote new videos around noon, right when the two-hour traffic spike starts.

“Based on the traffic I’m seeing,” said Miguel Monteverde, executive director of AOL Video, “our nation’s productivity is in question.”

From an apartment in Greenwich Village, Rob Millis and Will Coghlan are hosts and producers of a three-minute daily Webcast, Political Lunch, done around 10 a.m., followed by an hour and a half of editing, in time for uploading just before noon. Political Lunch, which was introduced in September and appears on several Web sites, is viewed 10,000 to 20,000 times a week, with a peak in traffic from 1 to 3 p.m.

“It’s an Internet version of appointment viewing,” Mr. Millis said.

One man who takes his midday video schedule seriously is Jason Spitz, a merchandise manager for a major record label in Los Angeles. He trades links to videos with his friends all day — usually low-budget sketch comedy bits from FunnyOrDie.com or CollegeHumor.com — and stockpiles them to watch during lunch breaks. He and his colleagues like to look at the same videos at the same time from their separate desks, turning the routine into a communal activity.

“The clips are shorter than a full 30-minute TV show, so we can cram several small bites of entertainment into one lunch break,” Mr. Spitz said. “The funniest moments usually become inside jokes among my co-workers.”

Noah Lehmann-Haupt, the founder of an upscale car rental company in New York, said that video snacking on short clips is “a good excuse to stay at my desk during lunch, which I prefer since it keeps the momentum of the day going.” He often watches segments from “The Daily Show,” now that Comedy Central has put eight years’ worth of episodes online for free viewing.

Plus, the format leaves both hands free to consume the day’s takeout meal. “I can’t exactly surf while eating, and it’s healthy to step away from e-mails and work for a few minutes a day,” he said.

Some content plays better over lunch. CNN.com, which draws an average of 69 million video plays each month, tends to promote lighter videos in the middle of the day. (“Cloned cats glow in the dark” and “Bulldog straps on skateboard” were among the most popular on a recent weekday.)

At NBC.com and other network Web sites, shorter videos draw more lunchtime traffic than longer ones, which are more often downloaded at night. For that reason, sites like NBC.com emphasize short-form highlights during the day and entire half-hour or hourlong shows in the evening.

From an advertiser’s perspective, the Web is a more flexible medium than television, because technology makes it easy to monitor people’s behavior and adjust programming accordingly. Better still, marketers have found that consumers are up to 30 percent more likely to make a purchase after viewing an advertisement at lunchtime than at other times of the day.

“Not only is advertising volume and Internet use increasing during the 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. time period, but people are actually buying and purchasing and reacting to advertising,” said Young-Bean Song, vice president for analytics at Atlas Solutions, a unit of Microsoft that helps companies with digital marketing campaigns.

Sticking to a set schedule turns out to be almost as important on the Web as it is on television. At blip.TV, a video-sharing site, Mike Hudack, the chief executive, encourages his producers to post videos at the same time each day or week.

“Continuity and consistency is incredibly important,” Mr. Hudack said.

“If you want to attract a loyal audience, you have to give them what they expect when they expect it.”

When consumerism curdles, it’s tempting to become an emotional Marxist about Christmas.

Not Karl. Groucho.

“Now the melancholy days have come,” Groucho Marx wrote to pal and fellow comic Fred Allen on Dec. 23, 1953. “The department stores call it Christmas. Other than for children and elderly shut-ins, the thing has developed to such ridiculous proportions — well, I won’t go into it. This is not an original nor novel observation, and I am sure everyone in my position has similar emotions. Some of the recipients are so ungrateful.

“For example, yesterday I gave the man who cleans my swimming pool $5. This morning I found two dead fish floating in the drink. Last year I gave the mailman $5. I heard later he took the five bucks, bought two quarts of rotgut and went on a three-week bender. I didn’t get any mail from Dec. 24th to Jan. 15th. … For Christmas, I bought the cook a cookbook. She promptly fried it, and we had it for dinner last night. It was the first decent meal we had in three weeks. From now on I am going to buy all my food at the bookstore.”

I found Groucho’s grouchy letter in Caroline Kennedy’s “A Family Christmas,” a selection of songs, poetry, prose, letters and a list of the questions most frequently asked of Macy’s Santa.

(“Q: Are you lactose intolerant?

A: No, Santa likes all kinds of milk, except buttermilk, although he will use buttermilk in cakes and pancakes.”)

The book includes the solemn and sardonic, including this verse from Calvin Trillin, yearning to escape the shopping zoo and endless loop of Der Bingle crooning and “Jingle Bells” jingling:

“I’d like to spend next Christmas in Qatar. Or someplace else that Santa won’t find handy. Qatar will do, although, Lord knows, it’s sandy.”

As a little girl, Caroline had the advantage of being able to ask the bloodhounds on the White House switchboard to get Santa on the line.

“The fact that he had the same soft Southern accent common to many White House workers of the day escaped me completely,” she writes dryly.

She includes a letter her father, as president, sent to Michelle Rochon, a little girl in Michigan.

“I was glad to get your letter about trying to stop the Russians from bombing the North Pole and risking the life of Santa Claus,” J.F.K. wrote, noting that he shared her concern with Soviet atmospheric testing. “You must not worry about Santa Claus. I talked with him yesterday, and he is fine.”

Ms. Kennedy writes that she continues the literary tradition of her mother. Jackie wrote Christmas poems for her mother, and Caroline and John wrote poems for Jackie.

As I read her book, it struck me that everyone must have a holiday tale they could write up and paste into the back of “A Family Christmas.”

Mine would be about Trigger.

When I was little, I got one of those wooden horses that bounced on springs for Christmas. I loved him and rode him every day.

One morning, I came down to the porch and the horse was gone. My mom explained that a poor woman and her son had walked by, and the little boy had stopped and stared longingly at the horse.

My mom’s world was turned upside down when she lost the father she adored at 12, so she had a soft spot for children who hurt. On a police widow’s pension, she was always mailing a few dollars off to St. Jude’s or to children she had read about who were hungry or needed an operation.

When she told me that she had given my horse to another child — a stranger — I was crushed. Whenever we fought for the next 16 years, I reminded her of her perfidy.

On my 21st birthday, I came home to find a bouncing horse with a handwritten sign in its mouth. “Hi. I’m back!” It was signed: “Trigger.”

I brought the horse of a different era to live with me, as a rebuke about how long it took me to appreciate one of my mom’s favorite sayings: “Don’t cry over things that can’t cry over you.”

Her lesson was lovely: that materialism and narcissism can only smother life — and Christmas — if you let them.

In a piece reprinted in the Kennedy anthology, Henry van Dyke writes: “Are you willing … to own, that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life; to close your book of complaints against the management of the universe and look around you for a place where you can sow a few seeds of happiness … to make a grave for your ugly thoughts and a garden for your kindly feelings …? Then you can keep Christmas.”

CONCORD, N.H.

The Hillary forces at the Plymouth Church caucus in Des Moines weren’t averse to bribes.

They were passing out See’s chocolates to Richardson supporters.

And they weren’t averse to threats. “My wife told me I’d have to join them or I’d be sleeping on the couch tonight,” said Ed Truslow, a compact 68-year-old manufacturing representative. He was still wearing his Chris Dodd sticker when he lumbered over to his wife’s side. A Clinton organizer slapped a Hillary sticker over the offending Dodd sticker, and with a frantic cheeriness told him: “Hillary now, right? God bless!”

They weren’t averse to bending the rules. When they realized that they might not have enough people to get even one Hillary delegate, they sneaked out of their assigned room to Red-Rover their neighbors over, before they’d been officially counted themselves.

It was understandable that Hillary’s “Golden Girls” acolytes would freak out when they saw the throngs of young Obama hopemongers swarming the caucuses. As one Dodd supporter said, looking for her little Dodd corner, “I’m lost in the Obamas.”

A caucusgoer drily noted that it did not seem the most propitious harbinger for Hillary that the fateful evening began with a threat to withhold connubial bliss.

But that’s the way the tough cookie crumbled Thursday night. The Obama revolution arrived not on little cat feet in the Iowa snow but like a balmy promise, an effortlessly leaping lion hungry for something different, propelled by a visceral desire among Americans to feel American again.

The Bushes always self-consciously and swaggeringly put themselves “on the American side,” as Poppy used to say, implying that their rivals were somehow less American. But many Americans can no longer see themselves in the warped values of the Bush White House or the pathetic paralysis of Congress or the disapproving gaze of the world.

They want a different looking glass. So they rolled the dice and, as The Chicago Tribune’s Mike Tackett put it, “voted for a smile.”

I interviewed three Republicans in the Obama section of the caucus who were ready for the red state, blue state merger. They said they didn’t want Hill and Bill back in the White House, and that John McCain was too much of a yes man for W., who had betrayed Republicans with his handling of the Iraq war and his fiscal irresponsibility.

Hillary’s aides were grumbling last week that Obama had no rationale to offer but himself.

Perhaps that was true when he started. People usually run for president because somebody tells them they should and then graft on the reasons afterward. But on Thursday, Obama’s vague optimism and smooth-jazz modernity came together in a spectacular fusion with the deep yearning of Democrats who have suffered through heartbreaking losses in the last two elections with uninspiring candidates.

Often unable to surf the electricity he sparked over the last year, Obama has now put on his laurel wreath and dropped his languid pose, tapping directly into what he calls the “fire burning” across the country — the dream of a cool, smart, elegant, reasonable, literary, witty, decent “West Wing” sort of president who won’t bankrupt us or endanger us or co-opt our rights or put a black hood on the Constitution.

“I want to go before the world and say, America’s back,” he told cheering Democrats in Milford, N.H., adding: “We are one nation. We are one people. And our time for change has come.”

Even though Obama was wooing the young demographic so coveted by Hollywood, he took a page from J.F.K. and avoided the casual look last week. There were no jeans or snow boots. Just dark suits, stylish ties and dress shoes.

By the time she got to New Hampshire, Hillary was reduced to urging voters not to buy into “false hopes.”

At a hangar in Nashua, with chatty Bill and chatless Chelsea, Hillary tried to purloin more of the Obama message. Besides saying the word “change” as often as possible, she said she was particularly reaching out to young people to help them “reclaim the future.” She claimed that she disliked the red state, blue state terminology — “We are one country,” she said, echoing Obama — even as she added that she should be the nominee because she’s the best one “to withstand the Republican attack machine.”

What she doesn’t mention is that she knows how to fight off the Republican attack machine because she and her husband were so adept at revving it up.

Listening to Hillary and Obama evokes the famous scene in the classic “The Night of the Hunter,” when Robert Mitchum, whose fingers are tattooed with “LOVE” on his right hand and “HATE” on his left, has a wrestling match with his hands to see which emotion triumphs.

In the movie, love does, but it’s a close call.

How many people rang in the new year at Times Square on Monday night? The simple answer is: One heck of a lot. The complicated answer is: Perhaps only the Police Department knows for sure, and it won’t tell you.

“We have stopped providing official counts” of large public gatherings “because no one was ever satisfied with them,” said Paul J. Browne, the department’s deputy commissioner for public information. “Whatever the count was, it was usually never enough for whatever group was involved.”

That has not prevented other people, however, from estimating the number of bodies that squeeze into Times Square and its environs every New Year’s Eve.

Jeffrey A. Straus, the president of Countdown Entertainment, the company that organizes the ball drop in coordination with the Times Square Alliance, estimated that Monday night’s crowd totaled at least one million people.

“I’ve been doing this now for 13 years,” he said. “I’m in the TV truck with our cameras. We can see people from 43rd Street to Central Park on Broadway and Seventh Avenue.” Monday’s crowd was swelled by the mild weather, he said.

“People want to be together. That’s what the magic is. People want to be part of that official countdown.”

Mr. Straus said that for many years the police shared its estimates with the organizers. The last time the police provided a number was Dec. 31, 2000, he said, when the estimate was also one million people.

Other estimates in recent years have been much lower. In most years in the late 1990s, newspaper accounts tended to cite figures of around 500,000.

That is fairly consistent with the numbers issued by the Police Department when it still provided crowd estimates. A chart printed in The New York Times in 1993 showed that from 1986 to 1991, police estimates of Times Square attendance on New Year’s Eve ranged from about 300,000 to about 600,000.

The one major exception was Dec. 31, 1999, for the countdown to 2000. Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was mayor at the time, said that the crowd was “pushing two million.”

That prompted an analysis by The Times, which found reason for skepticism.

The crowd is penned behind metal barriers on Broadway and Seventh Avenue on the blocks north of 42nd Street, with a lane about 10 feet wide kept clear on the street. That means there is a fair amount of open space.

The Times calculated the total surface area on Seventh Avenue and Broadway, including the street and sidewalk, from Central Park South to 34th Street (where many people in 1999 watched the ball drop on large television screens).

Using a measurement of two square feet per person, which has long been standard in estimating crowd sizes, the analysis determined that the total capacity of the viewing area that year was approximately 430,000 people. Adding some additional capacity to account for spillover onto side streets, the analysis determined that there was room for about 700,000 people — during what was certainly the most ballyhooed celebration in the history of the Times Square event.

This year’s crowd covered less area, however, than that throng. It extended from Central Park South only to 42nd Street, along Broadway and Seventh Avenue, Mr. Browne said, with some additional crowds in Central Park and along the side streets.

Mr. Browne said that he did not know how long ago the department stopped releasing its crowd estimates for all sorts of events, from parades to protests, but that it was probably about a decade ago.

Paul Wertheimer, the president of Crowd Management Strategies, a Los Angeles-based consulting firm, said that many police agencies across the country became reluctant to reveal crowd-size estimates after the Million Man March in Washington in 1995, which was organized by the Nation of Islam. The National Park Service estimated that the march drew 400,000 people. A furor ensued when the organizers insisted the number was far larger. A year later, the park service said it would no longer make crowd estimates.

“What did in fact kind of ruin it, and frightened police agencies or those people that estimated it away, was when it became a political issue,” Mr. Wertheimer said. “The organizers can charge prejudice if they don’t get the numbers that they believe occurred.”

But he said police agencies continued to estimate the size of such crowds to help them plan for future events and to evaluate their effectiveness in handling large crowds.

The New York Police Department has at least two ways of estimating the size of a large crowd. One is to use aerial photographs taken by a helicopter flying overhead, Mr. Browne said. The police then place a grid over the photograph and count the number of people inside one section of the grid. They can then count the other sections and multiply to come up with an estimate.

The second method, used for parades or other events where people are lined up behind metal barriers on streets and sidewalks, relies on a rule of thumb of about 2,500 people per block, Mr. Browne said. That figure is meant to be a total that includes people on both sides of a street, he said.

That rule would not seem to apply to the Times Square celebration, however, partly because the barricaded areas were often larger than those for a typical parade.

Broadway and Seventh Avenue each run for 17 blocks from 42nd to 59th Streets, for a total of 34 blocks. But multiplying 34 by 2,500, using the parade formula, yields just 85,000 people, clearly a gross underestimate.

Mr. Straus, the event organizer, acknowledged that calculating the number of people packed into Times Square on New Year’s Eve can feel a little like guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar.

“It’s an art, not a science,” he said. “And at the end of the day, does it really matter? It’s a lot of people.”

In western Virginia, far from the limelight, United States Attorney John L. Brownlee found himself on the telephone last year with a political and legal superstar, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

For years, Mr. Brownlee and his small team had been building a case that the maker of the painkiller OxyContin had misled the public when it claimed the drug was less prone to abuse than competing narcotics. The drug was believed to be a factor in hundreds of deaths involving its abuse.

Mr. Giuliani, celebrated for his stewardship of New York City after 9/11, soon told the prosecutors they were wrong.

In 2002, the drug maker, Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Conn., hired Mr. Giuliani and his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, to help stem the controversy about OxyContin. Among Mr. Giuliani’s missions was the job of convincing public officials that they could trust Purdue because they could trust him.

So it was no small success when, after the call, Mr. Brownlee did what many people might have done when confronted with such celebrity: He went out and bought a copy of Mr. Giuliani’s book, “Leadership.”

“I wanted to be prepared for my meetings with him,” Mr. Brownlee said in a recent interview.

Over the past few weeks, Mr. Giuliani’s consulting business has received increasing scrutiny, at times forcing him to defend his business as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination.

But his work for Purdue, the company’s first and longest-running client, provides a window into how he used his standing as an eminent lawyer, a Republican insider and a national celebrity to aid a controversial client and build a business fortune.

A former top federal prosecutor, Mr. Giuliani participated in two meetings between Purdue officials and the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the agency investigating the company. Giuliani Partners took on the job of monitoring security improvements at company facilities making OxyContin, an issue of concern to the D.E.A.

As a celebrity, Mr. Giuliani helped the company win several public relations battles, playing a role in an effort by Purdue to persuade an influential Pennsylvania congressman, Curt Weldon, not to blame it for OxyContin abuse.

Despite these efforts, Purdue suffered a crushing defeat in May at the hands of Mr. Brownlee when the company and three top executives pleaded guilty to criminal charges.

Mr. Giuliani, who declined to discuss his work for Purdue for this article, has refused to talk in detail about his firm’s clients. He has said that he is no longer involved in the day-to-day management of the firm, which still represents Purdue.

Giuliani Partners would not say how much Purdue had paid it, but one consultant to the drug maker estimated that Mr. Giuliani’s firm had, in some years, earned several million dollars from the account.

“Everything I did with Giuliani Partners has been totally legal, totally ethical,” Mr. Giuliani recently told The Associated Press. “There’s nothing for me to explain about it. We’ve acted honorably, decently.”

In the OxyContin case, Mr. Giuliani’s supporters suggest that as a cancer survivor himself, he was driven by a noble goal: to keep the company’s proven pain reliever available to the widest circle of sufferers.

“I understand the pain and distress that accompanies illness,” Mr. Giuliani said at the time. “I know that proper medications are necessary for people to treat their sickness and improve their quality of life.”

To drive OxyContin’s sales, Purdue, beginning in 1996, set in motion what D.E.A. officials described as perhaps the most aggressive promotional campaign for a high-powered narcotic ever undertaken. It promoted the drug not only to pain specialists, but to family doctors with little experience in treating serious pain or recognizing drug abuse.

As a result of the expanded access, critics charged, OxyContin wound up in the high schools and street corners of rural America where curious teenagers crushed the pill, defeating the time-release formula, and ended up addicts, or in some cases, dead.

Dennis Lee, the Virginia state prosecutor for Tazewell County, an area hard hit by OxyContin abuse, said he was stunned several years ago to learn that Mr. Giuliani was working for Purdue. He had a favorable impression of Mr. Giuliani, he said, and a poor opinion of the company, which he said had played down and dissembled about its drug’s problem.

“I was shocked,” Mr. Lee said, “that he would basically become a mouthpiece for Purdue.”

Denials and Lobbying

Giuliani Partners served clients with a range of needs. The firm helped large accounting firms fight computer hackers and promoted Nextel’s efforts to expand its access to public airwaves. But some of the 55-person firm’s clients, like Purdue Pharma, were facing more difficult legal and public relations problems.

There were, for instance, the backers of a planned natural gas terminal in Long Island Sound who were facing stiff environmental opposition. Another client was a former cocaine smuggler hoping to win federal contracts for a computer system to track down terrorists.

On the business of these clients and others, Giuliani Partners carved out a lucrative niche in corporate consulting, crisis management and security.

In the process, Mr. Giuliani, a Brooklyn native whose legal career had largely been spent in government, became a corporate trouble-shooter with homes in the Hamptons and on the Upper East Side. According to financial disclosure forms filed in May, his net worth was more than $30 million.

The crisis that brought Purdue to Mr. Giuliani in 2002 involved OxyContin, a time-released form of the narcotic oxycodone, which had turned into a blockbuster product with annual sales of more than $1 billion.

But along the way, the pain medication had also become a popular drug for abuse. Among the company’s critics were officials at the Drug Enforcement Administration who said OxyContin had been a factor in hundreds of overdose deaths. Some D.E.A. officials and others also charged that Purdue had hyped the drug’s resistance to abuse and then failed to act swiftly when its misuse became apparent.

Purdue Pharma, which is owned by the Sacklers, a New York-area family who are known as museum benefactors, denied it had done anything wrong. But facing a growing number of investigations and lawsuits, it spent millions on public relations experts, lobbyists and top-tier law firms.

One piece, however, was missing: a highly credible and well-connected political figure to serve as its point man. Purdue Pharma executives saw Mr. Giuliani as that person, said a former company spokesman.

“He was just on the cover of Time Magazine, Man of the Year,” that former official, Robin Hogen, said. “Everyone was talking about his extraordinary leadership in 9/11.”

Giuliani Partners became involved in every aspect of the company’s problems, from the ballooning investigation by Mr. Brownlee to repairing its battered image. Mr. Giuliani personally took on some tasks, but a half-dozen members of his firm, including Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, were also involved.

Mr. Giuliani’s most important liaison to the company was Daniel S. Connolly, who had been a top lawyer in his administration. He spent so much time at Purdue that he was issued a security pass.

“His judgment was always sought on almost any topic,” said Mr. Hogen, who now works for a public relations agency in San Francisco.

Mr. Connolly regularly attended Monday morning crisis management sessions to develop programs that would shift the public spotlight away from OxyContin. The issue, the company said, was not its conduct but the larger question of prescription drug abuse.

To help draw attention to that issue, Mr. Giuliani became the public face of a program called Rx Action Alliance, a consortium of drug makers, physicians and law enforcement authorities working to curtail such abuse.

“He was America’s mayor,” Mr. Hogen said of Mr. Giuliani’s role as a catalyst for the company’s efforts. “People were drawn to him.”

One person attracted by Mr. Giuliani’s star power was Mr. Weldon, who was upset because young people in his Pennsylvania district were abusing OxyContin. Mr. Weldon, who lost his seat in 2006, said in a recent interview that he had told the company he planned to publicly speak out against it.

“This is really kind of outrageous,” Mr. Weldon recalled telling a Purdue representative. “You have got to do something more than say you are concerned about it.”

At Mr. Weldon’s urging, the company agreed to finance a program aimed at curbing prescription drug abuse. It also sent Mr. Giuliani to an inaugural press conference for the program, held at a high school in Mr. Weldon’s district. With Mr. Giuliani at his side, Mr. Weldon opted not to criticize the company.

“I am proud to be in Pennsylvania today standing with Curt Weldon — a true leader,” Mr. Giuliani said at the event. “I applaud the efforts of Congressman Weldon and of Purdue Pharma in taking this battle in the right direction.”

Credit for Damage Control

Asa Hutchinson, the director of the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2002, hardly needed an introduction to Mr. Giuliani. So it was perhaps not surprising that Purdue chose Mr. Giuliani as the person to meet with Mr. Hutchinson at a time when the drug maker was under intense scrutiny by the D.E.A.

“You need to have somebody who has clout to get in the door to legitimately make your presentation,” said Jay P. McCloskey, a former United States attorney in Maine who until recently worked for Purdue as a consultant.

By 2002, Mr. Giuliani was already helping to raise money for a D.E.A. museum, and his firm was part of a $1 million Justice Department consulting contract to advise it on reorganizing its major drug investigations.

The D.E.A. was not only critical of how OxyContin had been marketed, its inspectors had found widespread security and record-keeping problems at the company’s manufacturing plants.

Several top D.E.A. staffers were recommending that the agency impose severe sanctions against the drug maker, including possible restrictions on how much OxyContin it could make.

At two meetings, the first at Giuliani Partners in early 2002, Mr. Giuliani and Purdue’s executives argued that they were already taking steps to eliminate any problems.

Mr. Kerik had been sent to Purdue’s manufacturing plants to revamp internal security, they assured Mr. Hutchinson. The federal investigators, they argued, should back down and give them a chance to prove they could handle the problem on their own.

After the meetings, Mr. Hutchinson, who generally did not get involved in individual investigations, asked D.E.A. officials several times to brief him on the inquiry, Laura Nagel, the official in charge of it, has said in previous interviews. She declined to comment for this article.

D.E.A. officials say Mr. Giuliani ultimately did not affect the inquiry’s course. But Purdue Pharma did succeed in favorably resolving the matter. In 2004, it paid a $2 million fine to settle the D.E.A. record-keeping charges without admitting any wrongdoing. The sum was far smaller than the amount first recommended by Ms. Nagel, which one former D.E.A. official said was $20 million.

By the time of the 2004 settlement, it appeared that Purdue, with Mr. Giuliani’s help, had averted any significant damage. As the tide was turning, the drug maker’s top lawyer, Howard R. Udell, gave credit to Mr. Giuliani.

“We believe that government officials are more comfortable knowing that Giuliani is advising Purdue Pharma,” Mr. Udell said in a promotional brochure put out by Giuliani Partners. “It is clear to us, and we hope it is clear to the government, that Giuliani would not take an assignment with a company that he felt was acting in an improper way.”

Parents Not Persuaded

The limits of stature, though, were evident in Mr. Giuliani’s dealings with Mr. Brownlee, the federal prosecutor from Virginia, whose case against Purdue had been viewed by the company more as a nuisance than a threat.

It is easy to see how lawyers for Purdue might have underestimated the prosecutor. He ran a small office with 24 lawyers to cover 52 far-flung counties. But two of those lawyers, working out of a satellite office in the tiny town of Abingdon, Va., near the Tennessee border, had been investigating Purdue since 2002.

They had issued some 600 separate subpoenas and collected millions of company documents. The case stretched the office’s resources so thin that state prosecutors had to be deputized to handle other federal cases.

By comparison, Purdue’s defense team comprised all-stars, including Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Connolly and Mary Jo White, a former United States attorney in New York.

Mr. Giuliani had been advising Purdue about how to respond to Mr. Brownlee’s inquiry since its start in 2002, including reviewing documents the company had released in response to his subpoenas. And he shared the defense team’s view that Mr. Brownlee did not have any evidence to link the company to crimes, several of those lawyers said.

Early last year, however, Mr. Brownlee told Purdue that he was prepared to indict it and three top executives, including Mr. Udell, the lawyer. The company then handed Mr. Giuliani his most crucial assignment, to talk Mr. Brownlee down.

His selection was not by chance, company representatives said. They figured Mr. Brownlee, a younger federal prosecutor, would look up to Mr. Giuliani, who became a legend as a United States attorney in New York.

Between June and October 2006, Mr. Giuliani met or spoke with the prosecutor on six occasions. During those conversations, Mr. Giuliani was cordial but pointed in arguing against what he felt were flaws in the case.

Mr. Brownlee would not change course, though, even when the Purdue legal team appealed, unsuccessfully, at the 11th hour to his superiors at the Justice Department in Washington.

In October 2006, Mr. Brownlee told Mr. Giuliani and Purdue that he expected to ask for a grand jury indictment by the end of the month. Plea discussions ensued and Mr. Brownlee ultimately agreed that the three executives would not have to do jail time.

By this time, Mr. Giuliani was actively planning his presidential bid, as well as tending to other clients. On the day the legal team completed the plea deals with Mr. Brownlee, Mr. Giuliani was in Germany, giving a talk to business leaders.

He had a conference call with prosecutors for about a minute, but there really was not much left to discuss, except the weather.

“He said that it was raining,” Mr. Brownlee recalled.

In May, Purdue and its executives, after spending tens of millions of dollars to repair the company’s image, agreed to plea deals to avoid a trial. Together, they paid $634.5 million in fines and payments.

After years of denial and a high-profile public relations campaign, the company was forced to admit that it had misled doctors and patients. But to the parents of young people who had died getting high on OxyContin, the absence of jail time was evidence of Mr. Giuliani’s influence.

They voiced that view inside and outside the packed courtroom in Abingdon where the men were sentenced in July.

Mr. Giuliani was 360 miles away at the time, campaigning in Myrtle Beach, S.C., where he met with local firefighters and talked about 9/11. But his role in the case had been so substantial and sustained, the presiding judge felt compelled to address the parents’ concerns.

“It has been implied that because Mr. Giuliani is a prominent national politician, Purdue may have received a favorable deal from the government solely because of politics,” said the judge, James P. Jones of United States District Court. “I completely reject this claim.”

Even today, some of those parents are not persuaded. Ed Bisch, whose son died of an OxyContin overdose, said that he believed that Purdue got a free pass for years thanks to Mr. Giuliani.

“It was all because of Giuliani,” said Mr. Bisch. “And he got to take the money.”

HAMPTON, N.H. — Rudolph W. Giuliani has entered a turbulent period in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, marked by what his aides acknowledge are missteps, sharp shifts in strategy and evidence that reports about his personal life have hurt his national standing.

A $3 million investment in radio and television advertising in New Hampshire, a belated effort to become competitive in this state, is now viewed by the campaign as a largely wasted expenditure.

A Boston Globe poll published Sunday found that support for Mr. Giuliani had dropped in New Hampshire over the past month, even before any fallout from the decision on Wednesday by an ailing Mr. Giuliani to have his campaign plane turn around and take him back to St. Louis, where he spent the night in the hospital.

Some of Mr. Giuliani’s advisers are frustrated at the extent to which his decision not to compete aggressively in Iowa has pushed him to the side of the stage at a moment when the political world’s attention is focused on the caucuses there that will kick off the election season in less than two weeks.

Mr. Giuliani’s initial campaign theme, built around his record as mayor of New York, has given way to a new one: “Tested. Ready. Now.” But its introduction, in a speech last Saturday in Tampa, drew little attention on a day when most of the other Republican and Democratic presidential candidates were grabbing the spotlight in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Compounding his problems, Mr. Giuliani drew the kind of attention last week that a candidate with declining national poll numbers and a history of treatment for prostate cancer would just as soon avoid after he abruptly entered the hospital in St. Louis and stayed there overnight.

His aides declined to provide details of what had happened to Mr. Giuliani, other than he was complaining of flulike symptoms, or what tests he might have undergone. The situation grew even more muddled when Mr. Giuliani disputed what his campaign had said about his condition, saying that in fact he had been suffering from a severe headache and that his doctor would be able to issue a definitive statement this week after seeing test results.

As a result of all this, what might have been a one-day campaign trail story was still reverberating on Sunday.

Mr. Giuliani’s decision to maintain a light schedule of public appearances compared with his rivals, particularly Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Senator John McCain of Arizona, has stirred concern among some prospective supporters who fear that he does not appear hungry for the job, a criticism that shadowed him when he ran for senator in New York in 2000.

“I hate to say this, but I don’t think Rudy wants it badly enough,” Patrick Ruffini, a blogger, wrote on Townhall.com, a conservative Web site.

That sentiment by Mr. Ruffini, a former e-mail director for the Republican National Committee, was featured prominently on the editorial page of The Concord Monitor on Sunday, greeting Mr. Giuliani on a day when he had two campaign events in New Hampshire.

Mr. Giuliani is still viewed as a very strong candidate with continued high potential in a very unsettled field. He could be helped by the unusual calendar of nominating contests, with the chance it provides for him to pick up large numbers of delegates on Feb. 5 and recover from any early setbacks.

“We have always run a campaign that is based on a long-term strategy of getting the most delegates,” said Mike DuHaime, his campaign manager.

Still, the difficulties within Mr. Giuliani’s campaign come as he faces changes in the political landscape that do not appear to be to his benefit. For much of the year, he was helped by his positioning as tough on terrorism and by the perception among many Republicans that he was their best weapon to block Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton were she to win the Democratic nomination.

But issues like immigration are proving far more decisive among Republicans than terrorism, especially since the violence in Iraq has diminished. Mrs. Clinton is struggling to win her own party’s nomination, which has had the effect of undercutting what had been one of Mr. Giuliani’s biggest selling points.

Mr. Giuliani’s closest advisers in this campaign include a number of longtime loyalists who, though seasoned in New York City politics, have not run a national campaign before. One of the key questions from the start of his entry into the race has been the extent to which Mr. Giuliani would open up this circle — a small, rarely changing circle of hard-driving New Yorkers, known for tough language and tough tactics — to advisers with national experience.

To a certain extent, he has done this. Acting on the recommendation of Ken Mehlman, the former Republican National Committee chairman, Mr. Giuliani named Mr. DuHaime, a former political director of the Republican National Committee, as his campaign director, and Mr. DuHaime brought a number of veterans of the Republican committee with him.

But Republicans who have dealt with the campaign say that it is more Anthony Carbonetti, along with other New York insiders, who has Mr. Giuliani’s ear, and who is, with the former mayor, driving many of the major decisions in the campaign. Mr. Carbonetti, who has been a senior adviser to Mr. Giuliani since his early days in New York politics, has continued working at Mr. Giuliani’s consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, and spends much of his time not at Mr. Giuliani’s campaign headquarters in Lower Manhattan, but at the firm’s headquarters in Times Square.

The two camps were described by some campaign officials as culturally uneasy with one another. All the senior officials hold Thursday morning conference call strategy sessions, known as “the Chairman’s Call,” because it is led by the Giuliani campaign chairman, Patrick C. Oxford, a long-time fund-raiser.

When campaign aides talk about strategy, especially in public settings, they have taken to calling Mr. Giuliani “Ralph” rather than “Rudy,” according to associates of Mr. Giuliani.

One participant in the calls, who asked not to be identified because he was discussing internal campaign strategy, said the advisers often spent hours talking about subjects like the logistics of campaign events — where Mr. Giuliani would stand, what the backdrop would be — rather than a long-term message that goes beyond the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks or Mr. Giuliani’s record as mayor of New York.

Mr. Giuliani and his team are making a tremendous gamble: that he can make only token efforts in Iowa, New Hampshire and, probably, South Carolina, but still go on to win in Florida in late January and in many of the big states holding primaries or caucuses on Feb. 5.

His campaign has settled on that strategy after veering back and forth about the right approach. At first, his advisers signaled that he would largely bypass Iowa, as well as New Hampshire, where Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, enjoys a home-field advantage. Then he made moves to compete in both those states, especially New Hampshire, where he invested heavily in advertising and went toe-to-toe with Mr. Romney, who has spent close to $8 million on television spots.

But now Mr. Giuliani’s advisers say they have decided that their route to victory is to do well in Michigan on Jan. 15 and to win in Florida on Jan. 29. That would give him strength heading into Feb. 5, when 22 states — including New York, New Jersey and California, all of which have large numbers of delegates and relatively moderate Republican voters — hold their contests.

“At the end of the day, it’s a numbers game,” Mr. Carbonetti said.

What this has meant is that while the rest of the candidates have been in Iowa, where their every move is followed by hundreds of reporters, Mr. Giuliani has been investing much of his time in fund-raising or paying visits to states which have later contests. His campaign has reached a point where his success is increasingly contingent on other candidates’ failing.

If either Mr. Romney or Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, wins two or three of the first contests, Mr. Giuliani’s task will be greatly complicated, particularly if party leaders and contributors begin coalescing around someone who appears to be a winner.

Indeed, one of the points of division in Mr. Giuliani’s campaign is how to deal with the sudden threat of Mr. Huckabee. Some of them are arguing that a strong showing by Mr. Huckabee in Iowa would help Mr. Giuliani by muddying the field. Others are warning that Mr. Huckabee could eclipse Mr. Giuliani if they do not knock him back now.

Mr. Giuliani’s position has changed notably from even a month ago. For much of this year, Republicans had expressed admiration, and some surprise, at the extent to which he appeared to have dealt with concerns about his views on abortion and gay rights, as well as his private life. Mr. Giuliani showed significant leads in most national polls; he routinely drew warm and enthusiastic receptions from audiences more conservative than he.

His advisers say that a recent run of negative news reports, focusing on an extramarital affair and his association with Bernard Kerik, the disgraced former police commissioner that Mr. Giuliani recommended as homeland security secretary, is beginning to take a toll.

“I am a little disappointed with his personal life,” said Elisabeth Ackerson, speaking about Mr. Giuliani after attending a Town Hall meeting for Mr. Romney on Saturday evening in Londonderry, N.H. She said was trying to decide among Mr. Romney, Mr. McCain and Mr. Giuliani.

The apparent failure of Mr. Giuliani’s advertising campaign in New Hampshire stirred particular concern among some Giuliani advisers.

Mr. Carbonetti said the campaign decided to pull back on the television advertising after determining that the sheer glut from other candidates in New Hampshire was making it impossible for Mr. Giuliani’s spots to break though. “The airwaves were saturated,” he said.

Ed Goeas, Mr. Giuliani’s pollster, said he thought any gain from the advertising had been offset by news reports about whether Mr. Giuliani’s city administration in New York had properly accounted for his security costs, including during time he was spending with Judith Nathan, then his girlfriend and now his wife.

But other Giuliani advisers said they feared that the failure of the advertising to strengthen him in New Hampshire was evidence that Mr. Giuliani’s attempt to run for president based largely on his record as mayor was flawed.

Sure, there have been the YouTube-ified debates, MySpace.com polls, record-setting fund-raising efforts, and the now-obligatory Google office visits.

But knowing where the candidates stand on high-tech topics like digital copyright, surveillance, and Internet taxes can be revealing, which is why we’ve put together this 2008 Technology Voters’ Guide.

In late November, we sent questionnaires to the top candidates–measured by funds raised and poll standings–from each major party. We asked each the same 10 questions.

Not all candidates chose to respond: Republicans Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, and Fred Thompson rebuffed our requests, as did Democrats Joe Biden and Bill Richardson. In all such cases, we made repeated efforts to try to convince them to change their minds.

Read on for responses from Sen. John McCain, or check out CNET News.com’s election coverage roundup, featuring other Technology Voters’ Guide candidate reports.

Q: Politicians have been talking for years about the need for high-speed Internet access. Should this be accomplished primarily through deregulation and market forces, or should the federal government give out grants or subsidies, or enact new laws?
John McCain: I believe that we must promote competition and reduce regulation in order to secure lower prices and higher-quality services for consumers and encourage the rapid deployment of new technologies.

I have been a leading advocate in the Senate for seeking market-based solutions to increasing broadband penetration. We should place the federal government in the role of stimulator, rather than regulator, of broadband services, remove state and local barriers to broadband deployment, and facilitate deployment of broadband services to rural and underserved communities.

Congress has considered Net neutrality legislation, but it never became law. Do you still support the legislation that was re-introduced in 2007 (S 215), which gives the FCC the power to punish “discriminatory” conduct by broadband providers?
McCain: In general, I believe that we need to move to a different model for enforcing competition on the Internet. Its focus should be on policing clearly anticompetitive behavior and consumer predation. In such a dynamic and innovative setting, it is not desirable for regulators to be required to anticipate market developments, intervene in the market, and try to micromanage American business and innovation.

Telecommunications companies such as AT&T have been accused in court of opening their networks to the government in violation of federal privacy law. Do you support giving them retroactive immunity for any illicit cooperation with intelligence agencies or law enforcement, which was proposed by the Senate Intelligence Committee this fall (S 2248)?
McCain: The struggle against Islamic fundamentalism is the transcendent foreign-policy challenge of our time. I am committed to winning this battle, enhancing the stature of the United States as beacon of global hope, and to preserving the personal, economic, and political freedoms that are the proud legacy of the great sacrifices of our fathers.

Every effort in this struggle and other efforts must be done according to American principles and the rule of law. When companies provide private records of Americans to the government without proper legal subpoena, warrants, or other legal orders, their heart may be in the right place, but their actions undermine our respect for the law.

I am also a strong supporter of protecting the privacy of Americans. The issues raised by S 2248, and the events and actions by all parties that the preceded it, reach to the core of our principles. They merit careful and deliberate consideration, fact-finding, and exploration of options. That process should be allowed to proceed before drawing conclusions that may prove to be premature.

If retroactive immunity passes, it should be done with explicit statements that this is not a blessing, there should be oversight hearings to understand what happened, and Congress should include provisions that ensure that Americans’ private records will not be dealt with like that again.

The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s section restricting the “circumvention” of copy protection measures is supported by many copyright holders but has been criticized by some technologists as hindering innovation. Would you support changing the DMCA to permit Americans to make a single backup copy of a DVD, Blu-ray Disc DVD, HD DVD, or video game disc they have legally purchased?
McCain: The Internet and digital technology have provided widespread access to enormous quantities of information. This, in turn, made it necessary to update our copyright laws in 1998 to protect the rights of copyright holders to keep pace with the technological advances that characterize the Information Age.

As digitization of commerce, education, entertainment, and a host of other online applications proceeds, international copyright agreements have to be maintained and updated while protecting the rights of copyright owners.

I believe now, as I did then, that knowledge and ideas are central parts of what make the U.S. economy productive and competitive. It is vital that this intellectual property be protected and defended. However, we must ensure that such protections are never so onerous as to stifle the very innovation they strive to safeguard.

The Federal Trade Commission is reviewing the proposed merger of Google and DoubleClick. Some members of Congress have raised privacy concerns, while others have said the deal should proceed. What are your views? (Editors’ note: We posed this question before the FTC gave the merger unconditional approval on December 20.)
McCain: It is premature to draw conclusions on this specific transaction, prior to the conclusion of the FTC review. I am, however, a vocal advocate of antitrust laws and ensuring that antitrust agencies have the resources they need to protect the competitiveness of the American economy.

Although I support the oversight capacity of the U.S. Congress, I believe that oversight should not be confused with the micromanagement of individual regulatory decisions and processes. I have encouraged the FTC to investigate this and other important mergers carefully to ensure the interests of competitiveness.

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about sex offenders using social-networking sites. What, if any, new federal laws are needed in this area?
McCain: The Internet has a dark side–it can expose children to obscene, graphic, and violent content. Government must develop solutions that balance civil liberties against the compelling interest to protect the innocence of our children.

While the first line of defense will always involve responsible parents, when it comes to protecting children, government must not shrink from its responsibilities. One thing that must be absolutely clear is that child pornographers and those who would prey on children will find no quarter in the darker recesses of the Internet. Government must implement and aggressively enforce laws to hunt down and jail peddlers of child pornography and sexual predators who stalk children on the Net.

This is why I have long fought to keep the Internet safe for our children…(and) recently sponsored the Safe Act of 2007, designed to clarify and enhance the current system for electronic-service providers to report online child pornography, and make the failure to report child pornography a federal crime.

I have also aggressively sought to curtail the online activities of sex offenders by sponsoring legislation to ensure that such criminals register additional information such as e-mail addresses on sex offender registries.

The Bush administration has supported legally requiring Internet service providers, and perhaps search engines and social-networking Web sites as well, to keep logs on who their users are and what they do. Do you support federal legislation, such as HR 837, to mandate data retention?
McCain: I continue to study the legislation in particular and the issue in general. It is apparent that some well-informed analysts in the ISP, tech, and privacy communities are skeptical of the feasibility and value of this proposal.

At the same time, other interested parties, such as the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, support the approach taken in the legislation. I understand both perspectives, believe that further study and alternative proposals are worth exploring, and look forward to finding the best path forward for all those involved.

Do you support enacting federal laws providing for any or all of the following: a) a permanent research-and-development tax credit, b) a permanent moratorium on Internet access taxes, and c) an increase in the current limits on H-1B visas?
McCain: We stand on the threshold of a new era: the innovation age. New information and communications technologies are the leading edge of technology innovations that will permeate every aspect of our society, and I am committed to federal policies that ensure America’s competitive edge in technology and innovation. Maintaining our tech edge requires robust basic research and sustained development efforts.

I will support innovation by funding basic research, and reforming and making permanent the R&D tax credit. My leadership first kept the Internet tax-free, I recently sponsored legislation that extended that tax ban for seven years, and I seek to permanently ban taxing access to this source of innovation and growth.

I continue to be a strong supporter of H-1B expansion, but mere expansion is not enough. Reforms should eliminate the artificial limits and allow the Department of Labor to set a level of visas appropriate for market conditions.

We have to know: what’s your favorite gadget?
McCain: My slim, stylish gold Razr phone and I are inseparable.

Senator Barack Obama won the Iowa Democratic caucuses tonight in a stunning show of strength by a young African-American candidate who was virtually unknown to America three years ago. He defeated Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former first lady, and former Senator John Edwards, the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee in 2004 by a substantial margin.

On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee, the folksy former Arkansas governor and Southern Baptist preacher, defeated the vastly better funded and organized Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, riding a wave of support by evangelical Christians who said they were drawn to Mr. Huckabee because they believed he shared their values.

The Iowa caucuses drew intense public interest and record turnout on the Democratic side, which featured three compelling candidates waging a fierce campaign that turned on the question of change versus experience. Democratic caucusgoers strongly endorsed Mr. Obama’s vow to change the nature of politics in Washington, decisively preferring his case to Mrs. Clinton’s emphasis on her experience in public life as a senator and the spouse of a president and a governor.

Mr. Romney conceded early in the evening after falling more than 10 percentage points behind Mr. Huckabee. Mr. Romney, who outspent Mr. Huckabee by more than four to one, conceded in an interview on Fox News. “Congratulations on the first round to Mike,” he said. But he described Iowa as the first inning of a “50-inning ballgame” and vowed to stay in it until the end.

Mr. Romney sought to frame his defeat as something of a comeback, saying he had trailed Mr. Huckabee by more than 20 points a few weeks ago. “I’ve been pleased that I’ve been able to make up ground, and I intend to keep making up ground, not just here but across the country,” he said.

The crowd at Huckabee headquarters was ebullient as television news programs called the race. One man shouted “serves you right for the negative ads” as Mr. Romney conceded in an interview on Fox News, and applause went up again when newscasters talked about Mr. Huckabee’s success turning out his evangelical base. Mr. Huckabee is expected to board a chartered jet for New Hamphire at 11:30 this evening — something that is almost an extravagance for his bare-bones campaign.

In a caucus at the Plymouth Congregational Church in Des Moines, a record 454 Democrats appeared. The enthusiastic crowd heavily favored Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. Jon Muller, 42, the chief financial officer of an education nonprofit group, was one of the Obama backers.

“One of the charges against Iowa is that we don’t really represent the rest of the country,” he said, alluding to the fact that blacks form less than three percent of the caucus participants. “Here’s a chance to make a statement about the inclusiveness of Iowa.”

A sample of early arrivals at the Democratic caucus sites told interviewers that the war in Iraq was the most important issue facing the country, followed closely by the economy and health care. A slim majority of the sample of Democratic caucusgoers said that they were looking for a candidate who could bring about needed change, while only one in five cited experience as the most important factor in deciding whom to support.

Those who cited health care as the top issue tended to support Mrs. Clinton, who also attracted strong support from older voters and women.

Those who decided whom to support in the last three days tended to back former Mr. Edwards.

About a third of Republicans interviewed before they cast their votes cited illegal immigration as the most important issue facing the country, followed by the economy and terrorism. The Republican sample included nearly 60 percent who identified themselves as evangelical Christians, who expressed support for Mr. Huckabee by a two-to-one margin over Mr. Romney.

Those who make up their minds in the past three days tended to support Mr. Romney.

As the first state to express its presidential preferences, Iowa has gained outsized importance even though relatively small numbers of its citizens turn out for the caucuses, which on the Democratic side, in particular, are conducted under arcane rules that reflect intensity of devotion to a candidate as much as sheer numbers of supporters.

Candidates of both parties spent much of the final days of the race trying to minimize expectations. The race on the Democratic side featured three prominent candidates, Senators Obama of Illinois and Clinton and former senator Edwards of North Carolina, each of whom had hopes of winning and fears of coming in third.

As the costliest campaign in the three-decade history of the Iowa caucuses headed to an unpredictable finish, thousands of volunteers and campaign aides from across the country descended on neighborhoods and towns to coax voters to caucus gatherings. Politics dominated the radio and television airwaves, with advertisements back to back from morning until night.

The most sophisticated presidential campaigns that have ever been waged in Iowa — fully engaged for much of the year — ended in a flurry of old-fashioned get-out-the-vote efforts. The Clinton campaign, for example, has enlisted 5,000 drivers to ferry voters to the caucuses, particularly elderly women, who form a critical well of support.

In the end, after a year of political speeches and nearly $35 million in Iowa television advertising, the most important work in the hours before the caucuses was taking place far away from the candidates. Campaigns established telephone hotlines designed to direct voters to their specific precincts.

The results in the Democratic caucuses do not reflect the actual percentage of people who expressed a preference for a particular candidate. Rather, they are the percentage of delegates allocated to each of the candidates based on a complex formula; the Democratic Party does not release the actual number of Democrats who caucus for each candidate.

The Republican results reflect a direct count of the preferences expressed by those who participated in the Republican caucuses.

Mirroring the unusual rush of the nominating calendar — the primary in New Hampshire is a mere five days away — the major candidates planned to pick up as soon as the caucus results were known and flew to New Hampshire to be on the ground for early morning rallies, television appearances and campaign stops. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign plane was scheduled to leave Iowa at midnight.

The one exception was Mr. Giuliani, who largely skipped the Iowa caucuses; he spent the day in Florida — the state where he has chosen to make his stand — and was heading to New Hampshire.

Oil prices reached the symbolic level of $100 a barrel for the first time on Wednesday, a long-awaited milestone in an era of rapidly escalating energy demand.

Crude oil futures for February delivery hit $100 on the New York Mercantile Exchange shortly after noon New York time, before falling back slightly. Oil prices, which had fallen to a low of $50 a barrel at the beginning of 2007, have quadrupled since 2003.

Futures settled at $99.62, up $3.64 on the day.

The rise in oil prices in recent years has been driven by an unprecedented surge in demand from the United States, China and other Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Booming economies have led to more consumption of oil-derived products like gasoline, jet fuel and diesel. Meanwhile, new oil supplies have struggled to catch up.

Oil markets have become increasingly volatile and unpredictable, with large swings in 2007 that analysts attributed partly to financial speculation, not just market fundamentals. Political tensions in the Middle East, where more than two-thirds of the world’s proven oil reserves are located, have also fueled the rise in prices.

Gasoline has lagged the rise in the price of oil. It stands at a nationwide average of $3.05 a gallon for regular grade, according to AAA, the automobile club. That is below the all-time peak in May of $3.23 a gallon, but it is 73 cents higher than at this time a year ago. Some analysts worry that gasoline could hit $4 a gallon by next spring if oil prices remain at high levels.

Oil is now within reach of its historic inflation-adjusted high reached in April 1980 in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution when oil prices jumped to the equivalent of $102.81 a barrel in today’s money.

Unlike the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s, which were caused by sudden interruptions in oil supplies from the Middle East, the latest surge is fundamentally different. Prices have risen steadily over several years because of a rise in demand for oil and gasoline in both developed and developing countries.