WASHINGTON — Art and crass are all but inseparable. So it's no surprise to find an exhibition that brings together a record number of Jasper Johns's famous target paintings being bankrolled by Target. You pass the corporate bull's-eye logo, small but vivid, on a wall on your way into "Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965" here at the National Gallery of Art.

Mr. Johns's targets, endlessly reproduced in the half century since he painted the earliest of them, have themselves become a form of advertising, a logo for American postwar art. Through sheer omnipresence they've become nearly invisible. What could change that now?

The answer: Seeing them live. The 15 "Target" paintings installed in the show's first gallery look every bit as radical and mysterious as they surely did in New York in the 1950s, when, simply by existing, they closed the door on one kind of art, Abstract Expressionism, and opened a door on many, many others.

The National Gallery show, organized by the museum's curator of modern and contemporary art, Jeffrey Weiss, has mysteries of its own. It isn't a survey of the decade 1955-65, but a selection of 90 Johns works from that time organized by visual theme: targets, "devices," words and the human body. Other motifs at least as important to that phase of his career, like flags, numbers and maps, are nowhere in evidence. Nor can the connective "allegory" proposed by the exhibition title be readily discerned. No matter.

Walk in the door, and you're hooked. Try to move through the show in a hurry, and you can't. The work is too strong, too unusual. It keeps stopping you, here, then here, then here. Mr. Johns, you suddenly remember, doesn't just create visual objects, he creates situations, events. Each painting is a mini-theater, with farce and tragedy silently acted out and the audience invited to participate.

Initially Mr. Johns wanted the participation to be physical. "Target With Plaster Casts" (1955) is a painting surmounted by a row of wooden niches holding casts of body parts: a hand, a foot, a penis, a breast. And each niche has a little flip-up door, designed to be opened and closed by viewers, to give them a different, more intimate art experience than usual. Of course, if you reach for them now, in a museum, you risk arrest. So the real message, which Mr. Johns must have anticipated, is: Touch, but don't touch.

His art is built on such ambiguities. Most of his very early paintings, done in a thick encaustic medium that makes them look molded instead of brushed, feel like sculptures. Many of those done a bit later in oils have three-dimensional objects attached to their surfaces so that, like furniture, they carve out sculptural space.

Dada, cerebral and vacant, was a big influence on Mr. Johns. His group of paintings made up of the stenciled names of colors — red, yellow, blue — was inspired in part by Marcel Duchamp's use of language as art. Duchampian too are the so-called "devices" paintings, which have rotatable wooden discs, with squeegeelike arms for smoothing arcs of paint, affixed to their surfaces.

One assumes that Mr. Johns was declaring his complete dissociation from gestural abstraction, with its fetishized brushstroke, its existentialist soul, its emotional acting out. But then you arrive at a word-painting like "False Start" (1959), which explodes with hysterical brushwork. Or "Device Circle" (1959), on which the attached wheel looks gloomily derelict, like a one-handed clock. Or "Painting Bitten by a Man" (1961), which has a mouthful of wax encaustic gnawed out of its center, leaving a mark like a frozen scream or guffaw.

What's the story? Is he mocking expressive painting or declaring it compatible with Dada's cerebral conceits? Is he exposing a reserve of hidden passion beneath Duchamp's dandyish, bone-dry wit?

In 1962 Mr. Johns made a group of prints by pressing his face and hands, covered with baby oil, onto large sheets of paper. The resulting images suggest a person swimming up from beneath an opaque surface that he is unable to push through. Over the next two years he finished two paintings and a drawing that referred to Hart Crane, the American poet who jumped off a ship in midsea and drowned.

The larger of the paintings, "Diver," is very large and holds a compendium of motifs from earlier work: stenciled words, turbulent brushwork and a rainbow-colored target. At the center, two long wooden arms, ending in palms-open hands, reach upward.

If the painting theatrically approximates the psychic splintering that drove Crane to suicide, the related charcoal drawing, also called "Diver," suggests the aftermath of his leap. Here the arms have hands at both ends. They point both downward and upward, with the descending hands meeting to form the shape of a skull in a subaqueous twilight.

It is in these theme-gathering works that a narrative, or "allegory," comes together, though how to interpret it is hard to say. Countless glosses have been applied to Mr. Johns's art, which is always assumed to be thick with coded meanings. Critics and scholars have scrutinized the art he has looked at, the writers he has read, the thinkers he has thought about.

Others have parsed his life. The artist Robert Morris, in a powerful catalog essay, links the themes of targets, flags and maps to Mr. Johns's stint in the Army from 1951 to 1953. The art historians Kenneth E. Silver and Jonathan Katz have noted the dark, personal turn in his art after he and his lover, Robert Rauschenberg, split up in 1961. Their relationship seems to have shaped the careers of both men. It lives on in an art-world game that pits them against each other in a who's-greater competition, though they are very different kinds of artists.

And what kind of artist is Mr. Johns? Various labels have been advanced: post-Dada, proto-Pop. I would call him a metaphysical artist, in the way that the 17th-century English poet John Donne is a metaphysical poet. Like Donne's poetry, Mr. Johns's art is equally about body and mind, sensuality and reflection. It is unmystical, unromantic, unnostalgic but obsessed with transcendence and the reality of loss.

Despite the difference in medium, the languages of Donne and Mr. Johns share many features: deliberate awkwardness, ungraceful beauty, a virtuosity so extreme that it turns weird. Their work can be startlingly, even embarrassingly candid, but is more often self-protectively opaque. Metaphor, rather than statement or confession, is their method. Some people find Donne manipulatively difficult and withholding. They might feel the same about Mr. Johns.

Finally, both metaphysicians appeared when a culture was on the cusp of change. And they were prepared to engage with that change, boldly, anxiously, in long careers that were electrifying early but are of profound interest all the way through. Mr. Johns's career is of course still very much in progress, and I look forward to each future phase. I know of no major postwar American male artist whose work more completely approaches the condition of poetry, that reads as richly as it looks. To me it always feels new.

MIAMI, Feb. 1 — Prince, the reclusive pop icon, stepped to the microphone at the Miami Convention Center on Thursday afternoon, apologized in advance for the aural overload he was about to cause, and said, "Contrary to rumor, I'd like to take a few questions right now."

Well, it was a news conference. But at the first shout of a question, Prince turned his back to the audience of a few hundred reporters and burst into a hard-driving guitar riff that resonated like the first rumblings of thunder in an electrical storm.

Prince and his band squeezed more juice out of their 15-minute preview of their Super Bowl XLI halftime show than could be strained from a grove of Florida orange trees.

He wore a suit, a shirt unbuttoned to his navel and boots, all of which were as orange as the "C" on the Chicago Bears' helmets. In his dress and in his performance, Prince was as vibrant as Billy Joel, the musician who preceded him on the stage, was dreary. Clad in khaki and black, Joel, who will sing the national anthem, answered questions as if he were channeling New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick.

"I'm just here to do a press conference," Joel said. "I'm not here to entertain anybody."

That job fell to Prince, who was more than up to the task. He sang "Johnny B. Goode," "Anotherloverholenyohead" and "Get on the Boat." If his three-song set was any indication, the Bears and the Indianapolis Colts will be hard pressed to outperform him Sunday at Dolphin Stadium.

The 48-year-old Prince has an avid following among the Bears. Asked about him on Thursday, cornerback Charles Tillman smiled and cooed the refrain from "Kiss," which Prince recorded in 1986 when Tillman was 5 years old.

"He's very unique and I respect him because he doesn't care what anybody else says," Tillman said. "He has his own style, his own uniqueness about himself."

On Wednesday, as the Bears were returning from practice, the radio on the team bus was tuned to a station that was running a Prince marathon. Led by Tillman, cornerback Nathan Vasher and safety Chris Harris, the Bears on the bus sang along to such classics as "1999" and "Purple Rain."

"It was very, very funny," Harris said. "A bunch of high-pitched voices on a football bus. If anybody else had been on there, they would have thought we were crazy."

Harris said his sisters seem more excited about getting to see Prince perform at the Super Bowl than he is. "I wish I could see the performance," he said. "It will be good."

The players, of course, will not be able to watch Prince's show Sunday. They will be in their locker rooms, plotting their second-half strategies.

"We're not here to see the halftime show, and I understand and I know why," Tillman said. "But, you know, who wouldn't like to see Prince?"

BIG SANDY, Tex., Jan. 23 — Lovie Smith was a million miles from here when he realized just how far he had come.

Smith had coached the Bears to a berth in the Super Bowl a couple of hours earlier Sunday, at Soldier Field in Chicago. Confetti had flown, cameras had flashed and tears had fallen.

But it was not until Smith was insulated from the significance of the moment, surrounded by his wife, MaryAnne, and their three sons, that the events of his life had caught up and gang-tackled him. Driving toward home in the well-groomed Chicago suburbs, Smith reflected on how broad the distance was from there to here, his hometown in the hilly woods of East Texas.

To him, the distance was not filled with hurdles. Only life.

"You start reminiscing a lot about where you've come from," Smith said Monday night, sitting in a leather chair in his office at Halas Hall, the Bears' headquarters in Lake Forest, Ill.

The next day, Lovie Smith Drive in Big Sandy (population 1,288) was silent. The three-bedroom house where Smith was reared burned down years ago, after the family had moved on.

There is little left but pieces of a chain-link fence and concrete, a water heater split open like a clam and some charred wood. The thick tree that stood sentinel in the front yard now blends with the overgrown brush. The driveway is a narrow rut covered in bushes.

What used to be called Church Street is a short, skinny lane lined by a swampy thicket. There are churches at both ends, but a street sign on only one. There is no evidence that anyone lives on Lovie Smith Drive anymore.

It is in the heart of the Flats, a hollow on the poor side of the railroad tracks where the black children went to a tiny school until the late 1960s, when Smith was in the fourth grade. The white children went to a big school at the top of a hill, under the town's water tower.

Smith, named for a great aunt named Lavana, spent his childhood summers hauling watermelons and bales of hay. He was the third of Thurman and Mae Smith's five children. His father, an alcoholic, supervised the laundry operation at a hospital. His mother worked as a hospital cook, then in a chair factory and at the Levi Strauss plant. She has diabetes and lost her sight years ago.

"If I don't make it," Lovie Smith said in his office, "it's going to be on me. It's not going to be about color or where I came from, how much money we had growing up. It's about what I wanted to do. There are no limits to what I can do.

"My mother constantly preaching, my family constantly preaching: 'You can do it, Lovie. You're special. Whatever you want to accomplish, you can.' When you hear that over and over, there's no hurdle that's going to make you say, 'Hey, I can't do that.' "

When town officials approached Smith about naming a street after him, they offered more regal drives.

"But I didn't live on those streets," Smith said. He and MaryAnne attended the dedication last June.

In the one-block downtown, a window was covered with painted messages: Big Sandy ?'s Lovie and Lovie is #1. Inside the door to Texas Checks, an employee-screening business, the owner, Susan Hubbard, helped plan a Super Bowl pep rally and party.

A street will be blocked off, although it probably does not need to be. The Big Sandy School band and cheerleaders will perform. A church is setting up a big-screen television for the game. There will be a potluck supper, with deer chili as the main course.

"The only thing I can think of that was bigger than this was when the oil truck flipped over and nearly burned the town down," said Hubbard, Big Sandy class of 1972, four years ahead of Smith. The accident was about 30 years ago. "It burned the drugstore down, and nearly the bank, too."

That corner now has a stoplight, the only one in town. A blond-brick City Hall was built where the drugstore used to be.

The Interstate System bypassed Big Sandy decades ago — I-20, linking Dallas and Shreveport, La., runs about 10 miles south — and left the town in perpetual sleepiness, a middle-class bedroom community.

Socially, the town revolves around high school football. Smith, a tight end and middle linebacker, helped the Wildcats to three consecutive state championships from 1973 to 1975. Big Sandy football has not won a state title since.

"I'm so happy to see him make it," said Smith's former teammate Bobby Mitchell, now a technician at a collision-repair shop in nearby Longview. He wore coveralls and a high-watt smile. "It's the biggest thing to happen in Big Sandy since the championships."

Others consider Smith's success a sort of karmic bookend to the death of David Overstreet in 1984. He played with Smith in Big Sandy, starred as a running back at Oklahoma and was a first-round draft choice of the Miami Dolphins. At 25, he was killed in a car accident outside town. A glass case in the main hallway of the sprawling Big Sandy School honors him.

That hallway is lined with photographs of each graduating class. There are 34 members of the class of 1976. Smith is the one with a white suit and a two-inch Afro.

Children unfamiliar with Smith are learning about him now. In a character-development class, students recently wrote a three-page paper on Smith. Last Tuesday, a boy told the teacher's assistant Wanda Harper that he was going to quit basketball.

"I told him, 'What if Lovie had quit?' " she said.

Smith's success — he and the Colts' Tony Dungy are the first black coaches in the Super Bowl — fosters a colorblind mix of pride and reverence. Smith was always well liked, a modest and hard-working child from a nice family. His sisters were cheerleaders and played in the school band.

"All of our little boys want to be football players or coach," said Patti Rozell, a schoolmate of Smith's who teaches elementary school students. "And Lovie has taken it to the top. And he's still Lovie."

Jim Norman played tackle in the 1970s, and his father was the coach. Now a machinist, Jim is a bear of a man whose jolly eyes grew glassy as he recalled his teammates and how well they got along, regardless of skin color.

"What we accomplished in the '70s, as far as bringing the town together, Lovie is doing all over again," said Norman, who is white.

Smith, 48, tries to get to Big Sandy twice a year. His mother lives in nearby Tyler. In 1983, when Smith took a job coaching linebackers at Tulsa, his alma mater, she had a dream that he would coach the Dallas Cowboys.

["That was the only team I knew then," she said during a telephone interview Thursday.]

In 2004, Smith was on the side of the road in St. Louis, waiting for a tow truck. His son had wrecked a car. The Bears called his cellphone and offered him a job as the coach. Smith's first call was to his mother.

"She has a direct line to God," Smith said with sincerity.

Thurman Smith died about 10 years ago. He had been sober for years, but alcohol never seemed to strain his relationship with Lovie.

"When everybody else was mad at him, Lovie was still with him," Mae Smith said. She punctuated her sentences with a laugh. "He was crazy about his father."

Smith does not curse — Jiminy Christmas is as blue as his language gets — because he never heard his father do so.

"Everything I ever did was perfect," Smith said. "I may do a few things wrong, but my dad only talked about the things I did right. The glass was always half-full. Always positive — you can do it, you can do it, you can do it. After I got older, I'd say, 'Dad, I'm thinking about changing jobs.' The advice my dad always gave me, 'Lovie Lee, do what you know is right.' "

It is the core philosophy Smith uses in coaching, and it has led him to Super Bowl XLI on Feb. 4.

All of that rushed through him Sunday night — but not when the confetti fell, or cameras flashed, or the tears fell.

In the car sat his middle son, Matthew. When he was 2, and Lovie Smith was coaching at Arizona State, Matthew slipped through a back door of their house. Smith did not realize that he had left the door open until he saw Matthew's limp body facedown in the swimming pool.

MaryAnne Smith performed CPR. Lovie Smith called 911 and prayed. Now Matthew is a sophomore at Northwestern, "the brains of the family," Lovie Smith said.

"There are days when it just hits me," he said. "You go through it again. Some days, Matthew, I just look at him. I just look at him and say: 'Hey, man, I'm sorry. I let you down.' "

On Sunday night, the car headed north, into the Chicago suburbs. A big city reveled around them. A tiny town celebrated a million miles south.

"Most of the time when major things happen, we think back to that, and just different times when things can easily go one way or the other," Smith said. "That's why we live in the moment, knowing that God has a plan for our lives. We're just going along for the ride. Once you get to that point in your life, it's easier. You're calmer. You know that everything eventually is going to be O.K."

INDIANAPOLIS, Jan. 26 — Engulfed by grief thicker than any fog, Colts Coach Tony Dungy did not lose sight of his purpose. Within hours of learning of the suicide of his 18-year-old son, James, in December 2005, Dungy and his wife, Lauren, consented to have their son's eyes harvested for donation in Tampa, Fla.

The cornea-transplant recipients — a man in his 50s whose body had rejected a previous transplant and a man in his 30s who had a thinning cornea — are unaware of their donor's identity, and their names remain unknown to the Dungys.

Anonymity is the hallmark of the Lions Eye Institute for Transplant and Research in Tampa, Fla., a nonprofit organization that coordinated the transplants. Jason Woody, the institute's executive director and chief executive, said both recipients live in the Tampa area, which is roughly a four-hour drive from Dolphin Stadium near Miami, where Dungy and the Indianapolis Colts will meet the Chicago Bears on Feb. 4 in Super Bowl XLI.

"I'm looking at the recipients' reports right now, and they both are doing fine," Woody said in a telephone interview. He added: "If they end up watching the game, guess what. They're watching the individual who made the difference in their lives."

That is what Dungy does. Quietly, courteously, he makes a difference. In 1996, after securing his first N.F.L. head-coaching job, with Tampa Bay, Dungy gave Lovie Smith his first job in the N.F.L., as an assistant in charge of the Buccaneers' linebackers.

A decade later, Dungy, 51, and the Bears' Smith, 48, are the first African-American head coaches in the Super Bowl. Three other assistants from Dungy's Tampa Bay staff are head coaches: Mike Tomlin in Pittsburgh, Rod Marinelli in Detroit and Herman Edwards in Kansas City.

With little fanfare, Dungy has joined the pantheon of top coaches. The spotlight that he never sought is now his shadow. He may not invite the attention, but it is hard to imagine Dungy not being able to handle it considering what he has been through.

His grace in the face of his son's death earned him legions of admirers. He continues to receive bags of mail at the Colts' training facility from strangers who relate to his loss. The correspondence means a lot to Dungy.

And yet nobody wants to be defined by a loss, especially one as personal as the death of a child. Dungy's discomfort this week in addressing off-the-field questions was evident in his carefully worded answers and, while delivering them, the way he crossed and uncrossed his arms in front of him.

"I think God gives you tests to see if you're going to stay true to what you believe and stay faithful," Dungy said, "and for me that's what it was. I think it was really a test."

He was asked when he knew he would be all right after James's death.

"I still don't know that I'm going to be O.K.," Dungy replied. "At some point, it was just time to move forward."

A man who puts his faith ahead of football, Dungy is as sincere and unpretentious as a handwritten thank-you note. In the national sports conversation, he stands out like a pause.

"He's very prayerful and meditative in the way he carries himself," the Colts' owner, Jim Irsay, said, adding: "He doesn't get overwhelmed with micromanaging. He doesn't get overwhelmed with things he can't control."

Dungy learned early that he could control only so much. He chose the University of Minnesota because it was one of the few universities that would allow for the possibility of a black quarterback.

After going undrafted, Dungy signed with the Pittsburgh Steelers and was converted into a defensive player. He won a ring as a backup safety with the Steelers in Super Bowl XIII. Once he turned his energies to coaching, he toiled as an assistant in the N.F.L. for 15 seasons before getting his big break.

He guided the Buccaneers to four postseason appearances in six seasons, but was fired in January 2002 after they lost to the Philadelphia Eagles in the playoffs for the second consecutive season. The Colts were in the market for a head coach to replace the elder Jim Mora in the wake of a 6-10 season.

Irsay liked Dungy's defensive background and looked at his low-key personality as a huge plus. He saw Dungy as the perfect counterbalance to quarterback Peyton Manning, who can be excitable to the point of implosion.

"It's about matching energies when you choose a head coach," Irsay said. He added, "I felt Tony's energy would have a calming effect on Peyton, and, no question, I think it has."

The first time Irsay and Dungy spoke, their conversation lasted two hours. Dungy recalled that Irsay had said, "I don't care what it costs; you're going to be the coach of this team." To which Dungy replied, "It's not going to be about money."

Within days the Colts and Dungy agreed to a five-year, $13 million deal.

The Colts finished 10-6 in 2002 and were shut out in the first round of the playoffs against the Jets. Meanwhile, the Tampa Bay team that had been groomed by Dungy won the Super Bowl under its new coach, Jon Gruden.

Ronde Barber, a defensive back with the Buccaneers since 1997, said in a telephone interview: "Some people will say Tony didn't have that 'it' thing to get us over the top. I don't think any of us bought into that."

Barber added: "I believe it's not because he left that we won the championship the next year. It just happened that that's when we hit our stride."

Dungy needed five seasons to mold the Colts into American Football Conference champions. To be sure, visions of the Super Bowl danced through their heads in 2005 when they started 13-0. But four days after their first defeat, at home against San Diego, James Dungy was found dead in his apartment in Tampa.

The Colts traveled to Seattle without Dungy, their spiritual leader, and lost, 28-13. Three days later, the players listened to Dungy during a church service in Tampa. That day he addressed, not for the first or last time, the importance of expressing love for your children without reservation or delay.

"When you give the eulogy at your son's funeral," Colts defensive end Dwight Freeney said, "and you stand up there and still try to teach people life lessons when your heart is breaking, that's the sign of an amazing man."

A year later, Dungy addressed an audience under dramatically different circumstances. On Sunday at the RCA Dome, after the Colts' 38-34 come-from-behind victory against the New England Patriots, Dungy hugged his wife and thanked his players, the organization and the fans as if his fingerprints weren't all over the championship trophy in his hands.

"Just to see him out there, with all the things that man has gone through in the last year, it was really special," said Rocky Boiman, a fifth-year linebacker who is in his first season with the Colts. He added, "That was one of the best things I got out of it, being able to contribute to a win for a guy like that."

In a private moment in the locker room after the trophy presentation, Irsay said he had told Dungy that James and some deceased members of the Irsay clan were looking down on them; Dungy said he felt the same way.

Dungy is a civilized man in a coarse profession. He doesn't berate his players or stalk the sideline. He doesn't spew profanity or chew tobacco. In his own understated way, Dungy uses football to show his players how to manage the game of life.

"He has stuck to his cause and taught his ethics the way he feels and it's gotten him to the Super Bowl," Colts tight end Dallas Clark said. "It's great. He hasn't had to change. He's done it his way."

It would be just like Dungy to leave Dolphin Stadium after the Super Bowl and keep on walking. There was speculation that he would retire at the end of last season to spend more time with Lauren and their four surviving children. He was noncommittal this week when asked if he was considering calling it quits.

"It's something I haven't thought a whole lot about," Dungy said. He added, "We'll see what happens."

Dungy has the most victories of any N.F.L. coach since 1999, with a record of 90-38, but the bottom line is not what defines him. His life has been about opening people's eyes so they may see talent and not skin color; spirituality and not celebrity; integrity and not self-interest. He has helped a lot of people see more clearly.

Over the last few years, as newspaper Web sites have started to maintain blogs, there have been plenty of setbacks. A Washington Post blog was shut down last January after commenters flooded it with vitriol, and the author of a Los Angeles Times blog was caught commenting on his own posts under a pseudonym.

But there is no sign that newspapers are turning back: just last Wednesday, The Washington Post announced that it would be adding three new blogs.

Numbers recently released by Nielsen/NetRatings, the Internet traffic measurement firm, suggest that such blogs are picking up readers. NetRatings said that traffic to newspaper blogs had more than tripled over the last year, reaching 3.8 million in December. (The total unique visitors to newspaper Web sites in December was 29.9 million.) Slightly more men than women read online newspapers, and that trend is more pronounced on newspaper blogs, 66 percent of whose readers are male.

"News and information is generally a male-skewing appetite," said Carolyn Creekmore, senior director of media analytics for NetRatings, "and blogs are really getting a lot of the most engaged consumers." ALEX MINDLIN

It has been a bad month for anti-Bush snarkiness.

First, the anodyne impressionist Rich Little was selected to address the White House correspondents' dinner as a follow-up to the scathing routine last year by Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert. Now a favored online tactic to mock the president — altering the Google search engine so the words "miserable failure" lead to President Bush's home page at the White House — has been neutralized.

Google announced on Thursday on its official blog that "by improving our analysis of the link structure of the Web" such mischief would instead "typically return commentary, discussions, and articles" about the tactic itself.

Indeed, a search on Saturday of "miserable failure" on Google leads to a now-outdated BBC News article from 2003 about the "miserable failure" search, rather than the previous first result, President Bush's portal at whitehouse.gov/president.

Such gamesmanship has been termed "Google bombing," and is not unique to President Bush, or even politics. John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, was linked to the search "waffles," while other Google bombs have been elaborate jokes or personal vendettas.

Writing on the Google blog, Matt Cutts, the head of the Google's Webspam team, said that Google bombs had not "been a very high priority for us." But he added: "Over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Google-bombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception."

Mr. Cutts was not available on Friday to expand on his blog, a Google spokeswoman said. A White House spokesman had no comment on the issue.

Despite the changes by Google, some other Google bombs are still operative. A search for "French military victories" still produces a first result that says, "Your search — French military victories — did not match any documents." Click there and your find a mockup of a Google search page asking the question "Did you mean: French military defeats."

The organizer of the "miserable failure" Google bomb was George Johnston, a political activist and software programmer in Bellevue, Wash.

What began as a prank become something more after Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Johnston said. In September 2005, he said he noticed a renewed interest in the "miserable failure" prank; he believes "people were in shock over New Orleans" and began typing "failure" into their searches. Mr. Johnston said he considered Google's decision politically motivated, even if was not done by hand, and noted that the company had agreed to censor results in China. "I believe them that they tweaked the algorithm, but it is such weasel words," he said. "The fact that some Google bombs still work makes me think they have a blacklist essentially of ways of tweaking results."

He hasn't given up the fight, he said, and remains unhappy with Google's tweak. "They say they fixed it. I think they broke it," he said. NOAM COHEN

When a court-appointed special master last year rejected the claim of an Alabama couple that their daughter had suffered seizures after a vaccination, she explained her decision in part by referring to material from articles in Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia.

The reaction from the court above her, the United States Court of Federal Claims, was direct: the materials "culled from the Internet do not — at least on their face — meet" standards of reliability. The court reversed her decision.

Oddly, to cite the "pervasive, and for our purposes, disturbing series of disclaimers" concerning the site's accuracy, the same Court of Federal Claims relied on an article called "Researching With Wikipedia" found — where else? — on Wikipedia. (The family has reached a settlement, their lawyer said.)

A simple search of published court decisions shows that Wikipedia is frequently cited by judges around the country, involving serious issues and the bizarre — such as a 2005 tax case before the Tennessee Court of Appeals concerning the definition of "beverage" that involved hundreds of thousands of dollars, and, just this week, a case in Federal District Court in Florida that involved the term "booty music" as played during a wet T-shirt contest.

More than 100 judicial rulings have relied on Wikipedia, beginning in 2004, including 13 from circuit courts of appeal, one step below the Supreme Court. (The Supreme Court thus far has never cited Wikipedia.)

"Wikipedia is a terrific resource," said Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago. "Partly because it so convenient, it often has been updated recently and is very accurate." But, he added: "It wouldn't be right to use it in a critical issue. If the safety of a product is at issue, you wouldn't look it up in Wikipedia."

Judge Posner recently cited a Wikipedia article on Andrew Golota, whom he called the "world's most colorful boxer," about a drug case involving the fighter's former trainer, a tangent with no connection to the issues before his court. He did so despite his own experience with Wikipedia, which included an erroneous mention of Ann Coulter, a conservative lightning rod, as being a former clerk of his.

"I have never met Ann Coulter," he said, but added that he was heartened that the friend who spotted the error could fix it then and there.

That friend was Cass R. Sunstein, currently a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. "I love Wikipedia, but I don't think it is yet time to cite it in judicial decisions," he said, adding that "it doesn't have quality control" He said he feared that "if judges use Wikipedia you might introduce opportunistic editing" to create articles that could influence the outcome of cases.

He added, however, that he could not fault a use like Judge Posner's, which "seems too innocuous for a basis of criticism."

Many citations by judges, often in footnotes, are like Judge Posner's, beside the main judicial point, appear intended to show how hip and contemporary the judge is, reflecting Professor Sunstein's suspicion, "that law clerks are using Wikipedia a great deal."

The Supreme Court of Iowa cites Wikipedia to explain that "jungle juice" is "the name given to a mix of liquor that is usually served for the sole purpose of becoming intoxicated." In the Florida case, the court noted that booty music has "a slightly higher dance tempo and occasional sexually explicit lyrical content."

As opposed to these tangential references, Wikipedia has also been used for more significant facts.

Such cases include a Brooklyn surrogate court's definition of the Jewish marriage ceremony and the Iowa Court of Appeals' declaration that French is the official language of the Republic of Guinea. In 2004, the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Georgia, referred to a Wikipedia entry of the Department of Homeland Security's threat levels in a ruling concerning magnetometer searches of antiwar protesters.

In a recent letter to The New York Law Journal, Kenneth H. Ryesky, a tax lawyer who teaches at Queens College and Yeshiva University, took exception to the practice, writing that "citation of an inherently unstable source such as Wikipedia can undermine the foundation not only of the judicial opinion in which Wikipedia is cited, but of the future briefs and judicial opinions which in turn use that judicial opinion as authority."

Recognizing that concern, Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School who frequently writes about technology, said that he favored a system that captures in time online sources like Wikipedia, so that a reader sees the same material that the writer saw.

He said he used www.webcitation.org for the online citations in his amicus brief to the Supreme Court in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios v. Grokster Ltd., which "makes the particular reference a stable reference, and something someone can evaluate."

Wikipedia is increasingly becoming the default reference for the curious. According to comScore Media Metrix, there were more than 38 million unique visitors to Wikipedia sites in December in the United States, making it the 13th most popular destination.

Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University Law School, saw this as crucial: "The most critical fact is public acceptance, including the litigants," he said. "A judge should not use Wikipedia when the public is not prepared to accept it as authority."

For now, Professor Gillers said, Wikipedia is best used for "soft facts" that are not central to the reasoning of a decision. All of which leads to the question, if a fact isn't central to a judge's ruling, why include it?

"Because you want your opinion to be readable," said Professor Gillers. "You want to apply context. Judges will try to set the stage. There are background facts. You don't have to include them. They are not determinitive. But they help the reader appreciate the context."

He added, "The higher the court the more you want to do it. Why do judges cite Shakespeare or Kafka?"

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 28 — Here in the Swiss mountains at the World Economic Forum, the annual conclave of world leaders, concerns over a growing digital divide this year have taken a back seat to the challenge of climate change.

Being out of the limelight, however, has not dimmed passions over what the best way is to deploy computers in the developing world. The controversy boiled over on Saturday at a breakfast meeting here where Craig R. Barrett, the chairman of Intel, squared off with Nicholas P. Negroponte, the former director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, whose nonprofit organization One Laptop Per Child is trying to develop a low-cost computer for the 1.2 billion children in the developing world. His prototype XO computer is designed to sell for $100 by the end of 2008.

Intel has also contributed significant resources to the cause, including its own design for an inexpensive laptop computer, albeit one that is currently more expensive than Mr. Negroponte's.

On Saturday, Mr. Barrett, speaking about Intel's efforts to train teachers to use personal computers, said that it is impressive to see what students "are able to accomplish with some help from a teacher," adding, "You can literally change people's lives."

But Mr. Negroponte suggested that Intel executives had engaged in a campaign to discourage world leaders from committing to purchasing his laptop systems. Mr. Negroponte also accused Intel of marketing its strategy to the developing world.

"Craig and I sometimes argue, and he called our thing a 'gadget,' " Mr. Negroponte said, referring to the XO. "I'm glad to see he's got his own gadget now. Craig has to look at this as a market, and I look at this as a mission."

Other executives suggested the dispute was doing little to forge a common strategy to use computing to advance economic and educational development.

"I do hear marketing going back and forth between you," said Michael J. Long, a senior vice president at Arrow Electronics, an industry components supplier. "We ought to concentrate on how we can help. The question is what can I do when I leave this room."

The dispute between Mr. Negroponte and Mr. Barrett, who was formerly Intel's chief executive and who is now chairman of the United Nations Global Alliance for Information and Communications Technologies and Development, covered both substance and philosophy at the annual digital divide meeting, which has been presented for three years by David Kirkpatrick, a columnist for Fortune magazine.

Also present at the meeting was Michael S. Dell, chairman of Dell Inc., as well as top executives from Sun Microsystems and Advanced Micro Devices.

Mr. Negroponte, who has quarreled publicly with both Microsoft and Intel executives in his quest to give simple portable machines to hundreds of millions of children, has long been known for his iconoclastic positions on economic development and education.

Recently at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich, he introduced himself as the "good bin Laden" — a reference to the notion that his low-cost laptop is terrorizing some companies in the computer industry because of the possibility that it will transform markets for personal computers in the developing world.

At the Davos session, Mr. Barrett sketched out a four-point program for getting involvement from emerging economies including affordable hardware, low-cost data communications, local curriculum and educators.

In contrast, Mr. Negroponte offered a vision based on working through children. He attacked projects that instruct teachers and students how to use programs like Microsoft Office.

"I think they should be making music and playing and communicating," he said. "It has to be a seamless part of their lives."

Despite initially trying to persuade Intel to back his project, Mr. Negroponte has chosen to use a low-power processor from Advanced Micro in his laptop, which was being exhibited here at a hotel near the conference center where the annual World Economic Forum is held.

It is still not certain whether Mr. Negroponte will succeed in his crusade. At the meeting, he said he now has eight handshake agreements with heads of state, including the recent additions of Rwanda and Uruguay.

However, he has also said that he will not begin manufacturing the laptop in volume unless he has firm commitments from one country each in Asia, South America and Africa. Other countries that have expressed interest include Brazil, Argentina, Libya, Nigeria, Thailand, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Mexico.

During an interview here, he said he now expects firm commitments by March and for manufacturing to begin in April.

Despite his publicly combative stance with respect to Intel, Mr. Negroponte has apparently moved to patch up his disagreements with Microsoft, and a version of Windows may be available from governments that chose that software instead of the Linux that the One Laptop Per Child organization is developing.

One Laptop officials said that the computer might cost $10 to $20 more to run Windows, because of hardware support.

Separately at the meeting on Saturday, John Gage, the chief researcher at Sun Microsystems, proposed an industry plan to deploy advanced data networks in developing economies with contributions of engineering staff time of 1 percent.

Mr. Gage, who headed the NetDay project for connecting American schools to the Internet, said that rural areas in the developing world would cost as little as a $1,000 a kilometer, compared with $1 million to deploy a network over the same distance in New York City.

TOMMY LEE, the former Motley Crüe drummer, steps into a makeshift D.J. booth in Sun Valley, Idaho, tattoos and nipple rings in full splendor like a peacock's feathers. Throngs of tipsy women in eerily similar outfits — designer jeans, studded belts and skintight T-shirts — suddenly materialize on the living-room dance floor, vying for his attention.

Meanwhile, a crowd of skier dudes in their 20s, dressed in baggy jeans and T-shirts, gather in the kitchen for the best view of the pro snowmobilers out front, jumping into the freezing air over a giant Red Bull ramp erected in the front yard. The house, an 8,000-square-foot mansion, also has an indoor rock-climbing wall, a backyard amphitheater and a heated lap pool and hot tub. A steady stream of partygoers arrives on plush coach buses staffed with cocktail waitresses.

It's like a Playboy mansion transplanted into snow country with Kipp Nelson, 47, a retired banker turned full-time ski bum, as its Hugh Hefner. "I want to bring glamour back to skiing," Mr. Nelson said.

Flush from his days as a partner at Goldman Sachs, Mr. Nelson is trying to revive the ski circuit in this country with a four-stop competition that offers a $500,000 purse. The Ski Tour, as the event was called before corporate sponsorship added "Honda" to the official title, kicked off during the Martin Luther King weekend last month in Sun Valley — a four-day extravaganza that included 15 bands, fireworks, countless parties and top-notch skiing. (The second stop, in Breckenridge, Colo., began yesterday and continues to Sunday.)

"What happened to the days when the pro ski tour would come, and these huge parties would hit the town?" asked Mr. Nelson, dressed in a ski jacket and beanie cap, as he welcomed some 500 skiers, catalog models and B-list celebrities to his palatial ski chalet in the chic resort town of Ketchum, Idaho.

"What happened to the hot dog era?"

Well, for one thing, snowboarding. As skiing sagged during the 1990s, it was viewed as a stodgy pastime for older people. Snowboarding, with its emphasis on freestyle expression and maneuvers, captured the youth market and, along with it, the sponsorships and advertising dollars that once fueled the professional ski circuit. The only major ski event in the United States today, between Christmas and Easter, is the Winter X Games — and it revolves around snowboarding, with skiing taking a back seat.

But don't expect the Ski Tour to feature Alpine skiing, giant slalom or big names like Bode Miller. The Sun Valley event featured only two competitions, skier halfpipe and skiercross (similar to motocross, but on skis), which owe their popularity to snowboarding rather than a nostalgia for Spandex and silly hats.

The festivities started on Friday night when about 3,000 people poured into the BaseCamp Music Experience Pavilion, a 14,000-square-foot tent erected in the middle of Ketchum. Fans of all ages turned out, dressed in layers as thick as astronauts'. There were young couples toting bundled-up toddlers, teenagers taking swigs from flasks and lots of skiers approaching middle age seeking to reclaim their youth.

Main Street was closed to traffic for the first time in 25 years to make way for bonfires, flame throwers and break dancers. JumboTrons hovered over the small downtown streets, projecting fast-moving images of daredevil moves and party montages into the night sky, while an outdoor D.J. played hip-hop.

THE entire spectacle felt like a heterosexual version of the exuberant Gay Ski Week held in Aspen, with the kind of excess that has wide-eyed guests whispering about how much everything must have cost. (Mr. Nelson estimates that the sponsors will spend about $7 million for the tour, or about $1.5 to $2 million for each of the four stops.)

Participants were impressed. "It's the best thing I've ever experienced, really," said Taylor Stoecklein, 19, a college freshman who has lived in Sun Valley his entire life. "It's the best thing I've ever witnessed in Sun Valley."

The headline performance that night was the Wailers, Bob Marley's former band, which took to the huge stage at about 6 p.m. Despite the minus-10-degree temperatures, thousands stood outside, swaying back and forth in puffy down jackets, as the Wailers belted out reggae classics like "Buffalo Soldier" and "One Love."

Meanwhile, in the heated V.I.P. area backstage, mini lamb chops and steak skewers were being washed down with kiwi martinis. Michelle Rodriguez, an actress from the TV series "Lost," was standing by the bar, throwing back Red Bull vodkas alongside pro skiers, ski industry executives and well-groomed Sun Valley regulars.

"I love people who think of things that are amazing and make them happen," said Ms. Rodriguez, who wore white fur boots and a matching fur shawl.

A huge fireworks display marked the end of the concert, but it was by no means the end of the evening. Hordes of hungry people packed the restaurants beyond capacity. Sushi on Second had a two-hour wait. The Cellar, a popular restaurant and pub next to the BaseCamp, was turning people away. "We ran out of silverware," one of the bartenders said, wiping the sweat from his brow.

The official party didn't stop until 2 a.m., after the rap group Swollen Members played in the NexStage Theater, the last D.J. packed up his turntable, and the town bars like Whiskey Jacques and Roosevelt Tavern enforced last call. But for those in the know, there were plenty of after-parties, like the one at the Loft, a converted warehouse in Ketchum, that lasted until dawn.

The late night didn't seem to dampen spirits the next day. By noon on Saturday, several thousand had turned out for the skiercross finals at Dollar Mountain, clutching cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon in gloved hands and lining both sides of the short oval course. A gaggle of fashion models in faux fur parkas, called the Ski Tour Girls, were passing out hand warmers and beer cozies, while Sun Valley's upper crust overwhelmed the small V.I.P. tent, sipping top-shelf gin and tonics.

A beer-fueled roar erupted when the ski racers finally emerged, like colorful rubber balls in a giant pinball machine, careening through the banked turns, bumpy rollers and steep tabletops.

"This is the biggest prize purse I've ever seen," said Casey Puckett, 34, who took the $25,000 first-place prize. Like many of his competitors, Mr. Puckett, a four-time Olympian in Alpine skiing, is a frustrated World Cup athlete who switched to the skiercross circuit a few years ago because it was more lucrative — and a lot more fun. The Ski Tour, he said, was "taking skiing to a whole different level by making it the premier event, whereas at the X Games, it's just one of many events."

No premiere ski event, of course, would be complete without television coverage. To position the Ski Tour under its desired spotlight, Mr. Nelson paid ABC an undisclosed sum to broadcast an hourlong show for each of the inaugural Ski Tour stops. He also hired a 40-person production crew to shoot and edit the program. (The first show aired midday on ABC on Jan. 20).

One thing the cameras didn't capture, however, were female athletes. In an unfortunate throwback to the hot dog era, there were plenty of ski bunnies, but no women's division in either competition.

"I came here because Red Bull wanted me to be here to show a woman's presence, but the organizers didn't even make an effort," said Kristi Leskinen, a top professional freeskier who has appeared in FHM magazine in lingerie. (Mr. Nelson said the organizers didn't want to "bite off more than they could chew" and that women may be included in the future.)

A marathon party atmosphere swept the town on Saturday night, with the sleep-deprived trying to keep their buzz going. The bars seemed even more crowded than the night before, though the high man-to-woman ratio remained the same: if the hot dog era was back, no one seemed to have notified the ladies. At Whiskey Jacques, a cramped dive bar where a late-night party was being held, the crowd was overrun with scruffy men in fleece jackets and wool caps, clutching bottles of beer and chasing after women like wolves.

"In this town, they say you don't lose your girlfriend, you lose your turn," said Thia Konig, 41, a photographer who has lived in Sun Valley for 13 years. "The guys are loving this because there's a fresh crop of girls from out of town." The Ski Tour wrapped up Sunday evening with the skier halfpipe finals at the Warm Springs base area, which, at 6 p.m., was far from warm. Thousands of spectators climbed up the steep slope to see Peter Olenick land a double back flip in the halfpipe; he's the only skier to have done that in competition. It made for great television, even if he ended up in 10th place.

BUT the real action took place at the nearby base lodge, where a fashion show was under way, featuring the Ski Tour Girls again and a few local amateurs, who seem to be living out every wild girl's fantasy, sashaying down the runway in everything from gold lamé hot pants to bikini tops.

It was the last event on the official schedule — a festive send-off to cap the first Ski Tour — but the party was far from over. "How long do you think this is going to last?" a woman whispered to her friend. "I still need to get home and change for Kipp's party. What are you going to wear?"

Mr. Nelson, who is famous in town for his elaborate parties, was holding an invitation-only gala in his mansion. Choosing the right thing to wear certainly wasn't an issue for a half-naked Mr. Lee, who, according to Mr. Nelson, was messing around on the climbing wall until 8 that morning.

"He finally asked me if he could just stay up at the house," Mr. Nelson said. "I said, 'Sure.' "

The Circuit

Stops on the Honda Ski Tour:

BRECKENRIDGE, COLO. Feb. 1 to 4.

ASPEN, COLO. Feb. 22 to 25.

SQUAW VALLEY, CALIF. March 8 to 11.

All-access tickets are $99. More information is at www.theskitour.com.

IT takes a big state to absorb the entire North every winter, but once again, Florida is pulling it off. From Miami to Pensacola, the cold-weather escapees have been filtering in, completing the midwinter migration to the Northerners' land of dreams — or at least, the land of polo shirts and khaki shorts. And with more than 50,000 square miles of territory, Florida has plenty of room for all of them — sun-hungry retirees, peripatetic second-home owners and seasonal settlers — to spread out.

So why don't they?

It's not exactly regimentation, and there are plenty of exceptions to be found, but Florida's winter arrivals clearly like to settle in clumps. Even in the sunny South, they seem to want to be among their own — occupying turf in the company of their clans, their neighbors, their golf buddies and, in general, people who share the cadences of their accents and the colors of their license plates.

That's why the Miami area is called the Sixth Borough — and why Palm Beach County voters lamenting the weaknesses of the butterfly ballot in 2000 so often sounded like Long Islanders.

It's why Memphis families returning from spring break will be walking around with white sand from the Panhandle city of Destin (not Fort Myers, certainly not Miami) between their toes.

It's the reason two newspapers in French, with a Québécois tilt, are published in the Fort Lauderdale-area city of Hollywood and a big Quebec bank, Caisse populaire Desjardins, has started three branches nearby, complete with French-flashing A.T.M.'s.

New Englanders settle around Sarasota, and Philadelphians camp out nearby in Clearwater. Minnesotans congregate on Sanibel Island; Ohioans on the Gulf Coast east of Panama City. Carolinians find their own in Daytona.

In the beginning, all of this segmentation was a function of the Interstates. From the Midwest, the most direct route to Florida, I-75, goes to the West Coast. From the Northeast, I-95 follows the East Coast straight down to Miami. From Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia, it's a comfortable drive to the Panhandle.

Now, of course, you can board a flight to just about anywhere in Florida. But Northerners cling to the old patterns anyway.

"They're like birds," said John Tuccillo, an economist in Arlington, Va., who serves as a real estate consultant to businesses and government agencies. "They keep to their flyways." Demographers have a name for it: chain migration. "People who live near each other share information about where to retire, where to vacation," said Lance deHaven-Smith, a professor of public administration at Florida State University in Tallahassee. "They tell their friends and neighbors, and then they end up in the same place."

Sometimes those flyways can be very narrow. Often a Florida resort has a chillier twin farther north. Seventy-five percent of second-home owners on Ponte Vedra Beach near Jacksonville are from Atlanta, according to Linda Sherrer, a broker with Prudential Network Realty. Palm Beach County has its counterpart in New York's Nassau and Suffolk Counties. Even Staten Island has a colony, in the Villages, a sprawling retirement and golf community southeast of Ocala.

FOR years, the high-toned West Coast resort town of Naples has been a domain of suburban Detroit. So many retired General Motors executives have homes there (including the former chief executives Roger Smith and Jack Smith) that a group got together and formed the 120-member Gulf Shores GM Retired Executives Club.

The Detroit connection may have solidified on the day in 2001 when Nina Machus, a snowbird from the suburb of Bloomfield Hills, and a friend dreamed up a women's club called the Juliets as a way for old friends to do something during their three or four months in Naples other than play endless rounds of golf. (They also wanted to outdo their husbands, who had started a men-only lunch club called the Romeos — Retired Old Men Eating Out.)

The Juliets started by limiting membership to current or past residents of Bloomfield Hills or nearby Birmingham. They got a book discussion group going, set up bridge games and organized outings. Soon the phones started ringing and didn't stop.

"We had to cut it off when we hit 100," said Ms. Machus, a vocal music teacher who likes to tune the TV to Detroit weather when she's on the treadmill. "It's hard to find a place that has room for more than a hundred women at lunch."

On a balmy Monday morning in November, 13 Juliets managed to squeeze into the narrow new fiction aisle of a local Barnes & Noble to discuss "The White Russian," by Tom Bradby. Half hadn't read the book. But the group's leader, Barbara Denomme, a former kindergarten teacher who is married to Thomas G. Denomme, a former vice chairman of Chrysler, started the discussion anyway.

Later, Ms. Machus, Ms. Denomme and a Birmingham Juliet, Janette Engelhardt, went to lunch and did a little shopping — first at a costume jewelry store that sells $10 watches, then in a boutique in Old Naples where Ms. Engelhardt admired a black net top for $885 and a metallic skirt for $820. "It's great fun," Ms. Engelhardt said of the Juliets club. "And it's become a tremendous support system."

Of course, there are exceptions to the migratory rules, especially involving people from New York State. A study this year by Stan Smith, director of the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida in Gainesville, found that of all the people who spend part of each year in Florida, the greatest number were from New York, with Michigan next, followed by Ohio, Pennsylvania, Canada, Illinois, Georgia, Massachusetts, New Jersey and California. Upstate New Yorkers have long gravitated to places like the central eastern coast and the area around Tampa and St. Petersburg. And now that South Florida has filled up, metropolitan New Yorkers are popping up in nearly every place where Florida sand meets the sea.

It would take radical change, however, to break the old ties to Miami, and the connection has renewed itself with the emergence of South Beach as a new winter haunt that mirrors the Manhattan and Hollywood scenes. The film and television producer Jerry Bruckheimer just bought a condo in one of the nicest buildings in South Beach, according to Diane Lieberman, broker-owner of South Beach Investment Realty. The rappers Diddy and Lil Wayne, the billionaire businessman Mark Cuban and the Yankees star Alex Rodriguez all have homes nearby.

After the 1970s, New Yorkers began to move north from Miami to Fort Lauderdale and then to Palm Beach County, often traceable for demographers partly by their Jewish ethnicity. Ira Sheskin, director of University of Miami's Jewish Demography Project, said that since the 1980s and 1990s, Boca Raton, Delray Beach and Boynton Beach had all acquired large Jewish populations of New Yorkers, though many Orthodox Jews buck the trend by staying in Miami.

Boynton Beach, a booming city south of Palm Beach, attracts New York's suburbanites. "This is Long Island plopped down with palm trees," said Beverly Sandberg, who is from Huntington, N.Y., and spent 10 winters in Boynton Beach before retiring there recently with her husband, Alan.

In nearby Delray Beach, Evelyn Stefansky, who was born in Brooklyn, opened a restaurant, Lox Around the Clock, a year ago with friends from Queens and farther east on Long Island. The bagel dough she has shipped in from Brooklyn pleases her clientele, and she has begun passing out chopped liver on bread to mollify impatient New Yorkers waiting in line.

Perhaps nothing solidified New York's identification with Palm Beach County more than the episode of "Seinfeld" in which Jerry's parents objected to George's parents' buying a condo in Del Boca Vista, a fictitious Florida development where they lived. In 2000, the real-life Jerry Seinfeld was spotted taking his real-life mother, Betty, out to dinner near her home in Delray Beach, where she settled after raising her family in Massapequa on Long Island.

Some Florida clusters come from even farther away. South of Orlando in Kissimmee and Davenport, pubs have popped up along the highways to serve Britons in the area's endless subdivisions. Germans buy in the Fort Myers area, where restaurant menus are printed in German and one town, Cape Coral, has its own Oktoberfest.

THE city of Orlando, as opposed to its sprawling suburbs, has a different kind of magnetism. It's become a microcosm of cosmopolitanism with Europeans and Latin Americans joining New Yorkers in the condo population.

Perhaps the most surprising development, however, has been the arrival of Southern Californians in Jacksonville. The Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville published a story about the phenomenon last year, and Jim Doyle, a Jacksonville developer, first noticed it a bit earlier. A new house in the Jacksonville area costs about a third of the price of a comparable house in San Diego, he said. "Our California buyers have been doing back flips at how much more affordable prices are here."

Bob Hamburg, 52, and his wife Carol, 58, left San Diego in 2004 and bought a four-bedroom, three-bathroom house with a pool in Palm Coast, Fla., an hour south of downtown Jacksonville, for $600,000. "This house would cost $2 million in San Diego," Mr. Hamburg said. Word has gotten out — two other houses on their block have been bought by Californians.

"I can open the windows and hear the ocean," Mr. Hamburg said. Air-conditioning takes the edge off the Florida summers, and there are $1 million condos going up nearby, a promising sign. "Someone told me this is going to be the next Naples," he said.

Mr. Hamburg just may have stumbled onto a whole new flyway.

"La-di da-di, who wants to party?" Lukas Rossi, wanted to know, though he needn't have asked. It was Wednesday night and Radio City Music Hall was full — O.K., maybe not quite full — of people who had paid good money to "party" with Mr. Rossi and his band. In a sense those people got what they deserved, though it could also be argued that no audience truly deserves what this one got.

The story starts innocuously enough, with a 2005 reality TV series called "Rock Star: INXS"; it was a talent show, and the winner became the new lead singer of the once-popular Australian band INXS. An economist (or a rock 'n' roll fan) might call that a negative incentive, but CBS executives called it a winning formula. The band (along with whoever it was that won) retreated back into obscurity and the show returned, last summer, for a second season.

In "Rock Star: Supernova" the prize was a chance to become the lead singer of a new band that was billed, straight-facedly, as a supergroup. Apparently some executive had earned his or her salary by persuading Tommy Lee (the Mötley Crüe drummer and bona fide rock 'n' roll celebrity), Jason Newsted (who spent over a decade playing bass for Metallica) and Gilby Clarke (who briefly played rhythm guitar in Guns N' Roses, though he didn't play on any album besides "The Spaghetti Incident?," a covers collection) to join forces. After a few months of intermittently entertaining episodes, the three chose Mr. Rossi, a Canadian yowler with — let's hope — a good sense of humor.

This band called itself Rock Star Supernova (it turned out that another band was already calling itself Supernova), and released an album, which American listeners shrewdly ignored; "Rock Star Supernova" (Burnett/Epic) was released in November, and never got higher than No. 101 on the charts.

Then came one of the most propitious injuries in the history of rock: Mr. Newsted hurt his shoulder, forcing him to drop out of this tour. Mr. Lee and Mr. Clarke had no such luck, so there they were, accompanied by Johnny Colt (the Black Crowes' former bassist), gamely bashing away while Mr. Rossi belted out the kind-of-neo-grunge songs and scuttled around the stage, trying his best to rile up the "mamas and papas" in the crowd.

A few songs, including the ballad "Can't Bring Myself to Light This Fuse," gave Mr. Rossi a chance to show off the quavering falsetto that helped him win this dubious honor. More often, though, the music was unusually easy to ignore, and the lyrics were just the opposite. It turns out, for example, that Mr. Rossi's "life is a ro-o-ollercoaster." He also wants to know, "Why does it rain on my parade every day?" Somewhere, Mr. Newsted was smiling.

The opening acts were also drawn from the TV show. Two of the losers, Dilana and Toby Rand, appeared with their own bands, and Dave Navarro (formerly of Jane's Addiction and briefly — disastrously — of the Red Hot Chili Peppers) played with his current band, the Panic Channel. All four of these bands played covers, ranging from nearly competent (Mr. Rand's fast romp through Billy Idol's "Rebel Yell") to mildly irritating (Dilana's overbearing version of the Black Crowes' "She Talks to Angels") to insufferable (Rock Star Supernova's clumsy hard-rock reading of "Bittersweet Symphony," by the Verve).

Given the performances, the crowd's warm-ish reaction seemed overly generous, but it made a kind of sense. There are, after all, millions and millions of American listeners who consider themselves rock 'n' roll fans, and who aren't particularly taken with emo bands like My Chemical Romance (too spooky), indie bands like the Shins (too obtuse) or radio-friendly bands like Hinder (too average). It would be easy, and satisfying, to blame record executives for not catering to this audience, but maybe this isn't their fault. Musical genres don't obey rational laws of supply and demand, which means the musical marketplace is always beset by gluts and shortages. Right now, for instance, there happen to be more great Southern rappers than listeners really want. And fewer great mainstream rock bands. No wonder some fans are happy to seek refuge in a show like this, which is full of people and songs borrowed from earlier, more triumphant rock 'n' roll eras.

Still, none of that makes Mr. Lee's drum solo any more palatable. None of that will turn Mr. Rossi into the rock star he wants to be. And none of it improves the experience of watching this ragtag band plow through "The Boys of Summer" or "Let's Spend the Night Together." At one point Mr. Lee pointed to someone in the audience who wasn't standing up and asked, "Are you kidding me, dude?"

Good question.

In Sidney Sheldon's pulp-fiction lollapalooza "The Other Side of Midnight," the heroine is an aspiring French actress named Noelle Page. She is destined to become a world-famous movie star, but early in the story she remains humble. Well, humble-ish. In wartime Paris as an ambitious young thing, she attends a performance of Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit."

Merely by sitting gorgeously in the audience, then demonstrating her remarkable get-acquainted boudoir skills later in the evening, Noelle is able to stun and then bag "one of the idols of Europe," the play's star. Little does he know that he will be one small rung on her ladder to the top.

Sartre and star fever, side by side: this was Mr. Sheldon at his risible but lovable high-low best. He was both literate and lurid, and he made that combination hard to resist. He achieved his effects by using a secret weapon: his nostalgic appreciation of Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and their storytelling skills. Thus equipped, and endlessly interested in the rich, powerful and tragic, he brought class to trash. And he did it with consistent professionalism, turning himself into a legitimate brand name. If that sounds like no great accomplishment, think about how rarely an author does it right.

Mr. Sheldon bridged two sharply different worlds. His early film and television career (working on screenplays for "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer" and "Annie Get Your Gun," then the small-screen series "The Patty Duke Show," "I Dream of Jeannie" and "Hart to Hart") was mainstream when the mainstream was innocent, or at least managed to look that way.

Later his books, strikingly more generous and benign than those of other, kinkier best-selling authors, took him into a more cutthroat and competitive realm. Still, he thrived. One reason was that readers could trust him. Buy a Sidney Sheldon book at the airport, and your plane seemed to fly faster: it really was that simple.

Kitsch was Mr. Sheldon's friend. "The Other Side of Midnight" became one of the great potboiler movies, still beloved for its hokum. And if its director, Charles Jarrott, also turned his talents to television adaptations of writings by Danielle Steel, Jackie Collins and Judith Krantz, he made it abundantly clear why Mr. Sheldon's material worked best. His characters were simply but impressively drawn. They could climb without having to claw.

By and large, Mr. Sheldon actually made them up. Within the gossip-à-clef genre that now dominates his category of fiction, the ability to do this has grown increasingly rare. Sure, he had a calamity-plagued royal family of American politics — "the Winthrops" — in "The Sky Is Falling." And there was an all-powerful Greek tycoon with his own island in "The Other Side of Midnight." But he surrounded these characters with legitimately fictitious ones. He invested their struggles with real and dishy emotion. Readers were drawn to Mr. Sheldon's stories for seamless soap opera, not for tawdry caricatures of recognizable celebrities. He was capable of dreaming up lives more interesting than Paris Hilton's, and he did.

That he was rarely taken seriously did not blunt his impact. He had great influence (and sales of 300 million books) as a guilty pleasure. Once the reader started them, those books begged to be finished, and they did not have to be dumbed down to rivet attention. Only a couple of Sheldon stories (including "Bloodline," with a glossy cast including Audrey Hepburn, Romy Schneider and Omar Sharif) worked as feature films. The rest, including "Master of the Game," "Windmills of the Gods," "Rage of Angels" and "The Sands of Time," were perfectly suited to the TV mini-series format; they were too delectably plotted to be compressed into a two-hour running time. Even their minor subplots were too much fun to waste.

Eventually the world began to pass Mr. Sheldon by. As raw greed, sex, violence and voyeurism became pulp-fiction essentials, his once-daring books began to seem positively genteel. They lacked the necessary malice for today's market.

They were low on schadenfreude too. Unfashionably, Mr. Sheldon retained a quaint respect for hard work, decent ideals and real accomplishments — the very qualities worth admiring about his own career.

Still, he had a public persona that stressed success. On his Web site, www.sidneysheldon.com, the reader eager for inside information ("Want to know even more about Sidney Sheldon? What he has for dinner?") needed to answer only rudimentary questions about the Sheldon oeuvre ("Name the first novel written by Sidney Sheldon") to peer inside the keyhole. If you passed a grueling two-question quiz, you would learn exactly what was on the menu on April 23, 2002, when Mr. Sheldon and his chef had a dinner party for eight guests. Click again, and you could find a slew of special recipes, like a pedigreed beef Wellington from Paul Burrell, best known as butler to Diana, Princess of Wales.

With Mr. Sheldon's death on Tuesday, there are two ways to look back on such self-promotion. The first, unavoidable view is that Mr. Sheldon became an inveterate show-off, seduced by the trappings of wealth and power. The second and kinder one: that he had the warmth of one of his own characters. The party was glamorous, and he wanted his fans to know about it. He did not want their noses pressed to the glass. He wanted them invited in.

HOUSTON, Feb. 1 — Oil prices have fallen, but Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell left their smaller competitors in the dust and reported record annual profits Thursday.

By making $180 million a day between them, the two largest publicly traded oil companies displayed their ability to ramp up production worldwide over the year, even in unstable places like Chad and Nigeria. Growth may be slowing and is likely to continue to do so in the future, but these two companies showed they could navigate the year's volatile energy prices that caused smaller companies to stumble in their fourth-quarter profits.

The expanding profits at Exxon Mobil and Shell, however, may also make them big targets for the Democratic Congress whose leaders want oil companies to pay higher taxes and work to curb global warming.

Analysts said that with oil prices rebounding again with more frigid weather, the entire industry is almost assured of seeing strong profits again this year.

Production in Mexico and Venezuela is declining because of politics, poor management, investment shortfalls and aging fields. And in Russia, production is slowing because of tensions between the government and foreign oil and gas companies over big investments. With worldwide crude inventories full, Saudi Arabia is keeping production in check to maintain its influence over pricing.

Energy consumption in China and India, meanwhile, continues to soar.

Just a few weeks ago, many traders were predicting that oil would fall below $50 a barrel. But now the consensus of traders is that $50 is more likely a floor, so that big profits should continue in an industry that is swimming in cash.

"Only a few months ago, I thought oil prices could go down to $40 and natural gas prices to $5," laughed Fadel Gheit, senior energy analyst at Oppenheimer & Company, who has since tossed out those expectations.

As for the earnings, he said: "The brutal focus on efficiency makes Exxon Mobil head and shoulders above everybody else. They arrive ahead of all the passengers, even those traveling on the same train."

Exxon reported annual profit of $39.5 billion, or $6.62 a share, for 2006 — its second consecutive annual record. Once again, the profit was the largest reported by any American company in history.

While Exxon's fourth-quarter results were actually down a bit from the year before, the enormity of its annual profits had Democratic politicians shaking their heads.

Under Democratic control, the House of Representatives quickly passed legislation last month to raise nearly $15 billion in taxes and royalties and use that money to finance research for alternative fuels. Many in the Senate support similar legislation, which may get a boost from a common perception in Congress that large oil companies are richer than ever and not doing their part to curb global warming.

As soon as Exxon Mobil released its earnings, Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, who is a leading Democratic spokesman on energy issues, accused the company of using its "outlandish profits" to lobby for energy policies that benefit it rather than the American people.

"The hypocrisy of the oil and gas lobbyists is so high that even as these record profits gush from their company balance sheets, they try to block all attempts to recover the royalties they owe the American taxpayer," Mr. Markey, who is on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a statement.

Apparently sensitive to perceptions, Shell did not announce that its annual profit was a company record.

The profitable results of the two companies came after reports by other energy companies in recent days that slipping commodity prices, rising steel and labor costs and higher royalties and taxes had hurt their bottom lines.

Exxon's refining and chemical businesses benefited from the dip in gas prices, giving it a cushion that the smaller companies did not have. Its worldwide oil production increased modestly over the year, though it declined slightly in the fourth quarter.

Shell reported a 21 percent rise in its fourth-quarter earnings, to $5.28 billion. That was mostly a result of a 4.1 percent increase in daily production of oil, to 3.65 million barrels, in the quarter. The company also continued to profit from its superior marketing and refining ability outside the United States.

Shell's income in 2006 was $25.44 billion, up from $25.3 billion in 2005.

Shell predicted oil and gas production growth of 1 percent to 2 percent annually through 2010, and slightly more after that.

Exxon reported profit of $10.25 billion, or $1.76 a share, in the fourth quarter. That represented a decline of 4.3 percent from the fourth quarter of 2005, when energy prices soared after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Shares of Exxon Mobil rose 98 cents, or 1.32 percent, to $75.08, while American depository receipts of Shell rose $1.23, or 1.80 percent, to $69.48.

Occidental Petroleum, ConocoPhillips, Hess and several other oil companies have reported drops in quarterly profits in recent days, but those results are in comparison to record or near-record in the quarters a year earlier.

Exxon executives concede that the company faces some big potential hurdles in the coming months should OPEC countries cut production quotas and negotiations go badly over transfer of control of operations in Venezuela.

Nicole Decker, an oil analyst at Bear Stearns, cautioned that 2007 could be a problematic year for oil companies because increased steel and labor costs "have not been reflected in the bottom line yet." She added that while she could imagine oil prices rising above $60 in the coming months, "I don't think anybody thinks oil prices will go up to where they once were."

She said increased production in Malaysia and Azerbaijan this year could help nudge down prices.

The lower fourth-quarter profits at many oil companies mostly reflected declines in oil and gas prices at the end of last year. Oil prices for the quarter ranged from $55 to $63 a barrel, averaging just shy of $60. That represented a 15 percent decline from the third quarter, but less than 1 percent lower than the fourth quarter of 2005.

Oil prices for all of 2006 averaged $66, or $10 higher than in 2005, according to a recent Citigroup report on the energy industry. Oil prices reached a high of $77 in July, but they dipped to as low as $52 in recent weeks.

Prices have firmed up lately on speculation among traders that fuel supplies in much of the United States will decline in the coming weeks because of cold weather and better-than-expected economic growth. Prices edged down slightly Thursday, to $57.30, and are about 10 percent lower than a year ago.

If you think politics makes strange bedfellows, consider the advertising hookup that grabbed so much attention this week: Nationwide Insurance and Kevin Federline.

What's a nice advertiser like Nationwide doing with a semi-celebrity like Mr. Federline? After all, in most coverage of his tempestuous marriage to Britney Spears, he seemed like an accident waiting to happen — an odd choice to appear in ads for a blue-chip financial marketer.

You can attribute, or blame, the beginning of the beautiful friendship to the new rules of Super Bowl selling.

It has always been a big gamble to buy commercial time during the Super Bowl, a k a the annual midwinter American festival of football and commercialism. The spots are usually the most expensive of the year because the game is usually the most watched TV show of the year, drawing around 90 million viewers. On Sunday, for Super Bowl XLI, CBS is charging a record price, averaging an estimated $2.6 million for each 30-second spot, compared with $2.5 million last year.

For years, the commercials that appeared during each game were here and gone in seconds; blink, and you missed them. So while sponsors spent lavishly to woo viewers to watch the spots — stuffing the commercials with attention-getting devices like stars, special effects and surprise endings — the hoopla had an expiration date.

Now, thanks to the Internet, Super Bowl commercials are like gifts that Madison Avenue tries to keep on giving. As soon as the game ends, video clips of the spots are posted online, on the Web sites of sponsors like fedex.com; the networks that broadcast the game like cbs.sportsline.com; and Internet media companies, among them ifilm.com, msn.foxsports.com, sports.aol.com and youtube.com.

"The commercials live on, and continue to resonate," said Bart Cleveland, creative director at McKee Wallwork Cleveland, an agency that conducts an annual online commercial poll (adbowl.com).

As a result, the stakes have risen even higher for the two dozen or so marketers that decide to buy Super Bowl spots. Failure that once lasted a day or so now has an indefinite shelf life.

What the highly topical Mr. Federline brings to Nationwide is instant recognition, a first leg up before the opening kickoff. The idea was to capitalize on all the recent publicity surrounding Mr. Federline's relationship with Ms. Spears. (His recent experiences were considered a perfect way to illustrate the Nationwide ad theme, "Life comes at you fast" — and sell annuities "that could guarantee you income for life.")

So far, the plan seems to be working. In a Nielsen BuzzMetrics survey of Super Bowl spots, released Jan. 24, the Nationwide commercial finished first, with 26 percent of all blog discussions about the ads in the game. On one day, Jan. 17, according to the survey, the Federline spot accounted for 49 percent of all online conversations about Super Bowl ads.

In addition to surveys like the Ad Bowl, gauging opinions about the best and worst commercials, there are now data collectors like Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Nielsen/NetRatings that measure for days afterward how many — or how few — people are visiting Web sites to watch the spots or posting comments on blogs about ads they liked or hated.

Although there are not yet official national ratings for TV commercials, TiVo provides second-by-second data measuring how many households equipped with TiVo digital video recorders watched — or re-watched — Super Bowl commercials. (Most years, a commercial has been the most watched moment of the game rather than a play.)

One company, FKF Applied Research, is even teaming up with the Ahmanson Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, to gather brain-scan images that will measure emotional reaction to the commercials.

"The Super Bowl 'echo effect' has been dialed up dramatically," said Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Nielsen BuzzMetrics, part of the Nielsen Company. "It's the ultimate torture test."

That means the marketing hype machine is being cranked to 11, as the band from "This Is Spinal Tap" would say, with advertisers scrambling to supplement their Super Bowl marketing plans with a panoply of ploys, all meant to stimulate interest in the commercials after the game as well as before and during.

The elements include offering online previews of spots, as Nationwide started doing Monday on its Web site (nationwide.com); sponsoring contests for consumers to create Super Bowl ads, as the Frito-Lay division of PepsiCo is doing for its Doritos brand of snack chips; buying key words from search-engine Web sites, to entice computer users; producing alternate versions of commercials; and posting online behind-the-scenes video clips or "deleted" moments.

"In the past, a commercial was filmed and then we determined if there was a component that could be leveraged," said Andrew Burke, vice president for marketing at Diamond Foods, which is running a commercial in the third quarter for the Emerald brand that promotes nuts as an energy source. "Now, an expanded campaign was part of the upfront planning."

The Emerald Web site (emeraldnuts.com) is chockablock with content aiming to pique curiosity about the commercial, featuring the crooner Robert Goulet and created by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, part of the Omnicom Group.

There are video clips with mock warnings about midday energy slumps; sound bites from Mr. Goulet in which he utters phrases like, "Click there, you know you want to"; and e-mail messages that can be sent to friends. After the Emerald commercial appears, the Web site will be freshened with new material.

Likewise, the candy maker Mars is adding bells and whistles, centered on a Snickers commercial in the game's first quarter by TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of the TBWA Worldwide division of Omnicom.

Through game time, visitors to a Web site (snickerssatisfies.com) can watch the first five seconds of the spot. After the commercial runs on TV, the online clip will be replaced with the full spot — and three alternative endings. The visitors can vote for their favorite, and the next time the spot runs it will conclude with the winning ending.

Steven R. Schreibman, vice president for advertising and brand management at Nationwide Financial, said the goal was for a Super Bowl commercial "to have a life outside the Super Bowl."

"The media landscape has changed so much," he said. "There are different expectations."

The Nationwide plans encapsulate that change. This year's efforts extend far beyond the Super Bowl efforts of just a year ago, Mr. Schreibman said, when the company ran a humorous commercial featuring the model Fabio. "We're trying to leverage it this time in as many ways as we can," he added.

First, the decision was made to feature Mr. Federline in the spot — created by TM Advertising, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies — rather than an established celebrity like Fabio. The Nationwide Web site, in addition to the preview of the spot, presents video clips from the making of the commercial; eight versions of Mr. Federline rapping the "Nationwide is on your side" jingle; an e-mail feature to send the commercial to friends; and a version of the music as an MP3 file.

Mr. Federline, who sings a mock rap song in the commercial, called "Rollin' V.I.P.," is even being incorporated into the "get a quote" feature of the Web site. A banner ad urges, "Let Nationwide keep you rollin' like a V.I.P." (Estimates are that Nationwide paid Mr. Federline $250,000 to $500,000 for the campaign.)

The initiatives extend beyond the Nationwide Web site. For instance, there are clips of Mr. Federline on YouTube and so-called leaked versions of the spot on Web sites like liveleak.com.

Nationwide also bought keywords from Google so that if you type "Super Bowl advertising" into the search box on the home page, a link to nationwide.com appears atop the sponsored links.

"They are checking off all the right boxes for maximizing 'buzz' leading up to the event," said Max Kalehoff, vice president for marketing at Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

During a spate of personal appearances to promote the spot, Mr. Federline said that "it's definitely been amazing to watch" the publicity build around his commercial. (He is to join Nationwide executives at the game in Miami, too.)

As for being the subject of still more publicity, "people talking about your work is a lot better than people talking about your personal life," Mr. Federline said, laughing. "I'm happy."

Will he and Nationwide be happy after the game? Stay tuned.

BAGHDAD

A PAINFUL measure of just how much Iraq has changed in the four years since I started coming here is contained in my cellphone. Many numbers in the address book are for Iraqis who have either fled the country or been killed. One of the first Sunni politicians: gunned down. A Shiite baker: missing. A Sunni family: moved to Syria.

I first came to Iraq in April 2003, at the end of the looting several weeks after the American invasion. In all, I have spent 22 months here, time enough for the place, its people and their ever-evolving tragedy to fix itself firmly in my heart.

Now, as I am leaving Iraq, a new American plan is unfolding in the capital. It feels as if we have come back to the beginning. Boots are on the ground again. Boxy Humvees move in the streets. Baghdad fell in 2003 and we are still trying to pick it back up. But Iraq is a different country now.

The moderates are mostly gone. My phone includes at least a dozen entries for middle-class families who have given up and moved away. They were supposed to build democracy here. Instead they work odd jobs in Syria and Jordan. Even the moderate political leaders have left. I have three numbers for Adnan Pachachi, the distinguished Iraqi statesman; none have Iraqi country codes.

Neighborhoods I used to visit a year ago with my armed guards and my black abaya are off limits. Most were Sunni and had been merely dangerous. Now they are dead. A neighborhood that used to be Baghdad's Upper East Side has the dilapidated, broken feel of a city just hit by a hurricane.

The Iraqi government and the political process, which seemed to have great promise a year ago, have soured. Deeply damaged from years of abuse under Saddam Hussein, the Shiites who run the government have themselves turned into abusers.

Never having covered a civil war before, I learned about it together with my Iraqi friends. It is a bit like watching a slow-motion train wreck. Broken bodies fly past. Faces freeze in one's memory in the moments before impact. Passengers grab handles and doorframes that simply tear off or uselessly collapse.

I learned how much violence changes people, and how trust is chipped away, leaving society a thin layer of moth-eaten fabric that tears easily. It has unraveled so quickly. A year ago, my interviews were peppered with phrases like "Iraqis are all brothers." The subjects would get angry when you asked their sect. Now some of them introduce themselves that way.

I met Raad Jassim, a 38-year-old Shiite refugee, in a largely empty house, recently owned by Sunnis, where he now lives in western Baghdad. He moved there in the fall, after Sunni militants killed his brother and his nephew and confiscated his large chicken farm north of Baghdad. He had lived with Sunnis his whole life, but after what happened, a hatred spread through him like a disease.

"The word Sunni, it hurts me," he said, sitting on the floor in a bare room, his 7-year-old boy on his lap. "All that I have lost came from this word. I try to avoid mixing with them."

"A volcano of revenge" has built up inside him, he said. "I want to rip them up with my teeth."

In another measure of just how much things have changed, Mr. Jassim's Shiite neighborhood is relatively safe. The area is now largely free of Sunnis, after Shiite militias swept it last year, and it runs smoothly on a complex network of relationships among the local militias, the police and a powerful local council. His street is dotted with fruit stands. Boys in uniforms roughhouse. Men sit in teahouses sipping from tiny glass cups.

Just to the south, the Sunni neighborhood of Dawoodi is ghostly at almost any time of day. Wide boulevards trimmed with palm trees used to connect luxury homes. Now giant piles of trash go uncollected in the median.

A serious problem is dead bodies. They began to appear several times a week last summer on the railroad tracks that run through the neighborhood. But when residents call the police to pick up the bodies, they do not come. The police are Shiite and afraid of the area.

"Entering a Sunni area for them is a risk," said Yasir, a 40-year-old Sunni whose house is close to the dumping ground.

A few weeks ago, a woman's body appeared. It was raining. Yasir said he covered her with blankets and called the police. A day later the police arrived. They peeked under the waterlogged blanket and drove away. It was another day before they collected the body. They took it at night, turning off their headlights and inching toward the area like thieves.

For those eager to write off Iraq as lost, one fact bears remembering. A great many Shiites and Kurds, who together make up 80 percent of the population, will tell you that in spite of all the mistakes the Americans have made here, the single act of removing Saddam Hussein was worth it. And the new American plan, despite all the obstacles, may have a chance to work. With an Iraqi colleague, I have been studying a neighborhood in northern Baghdad that has become a dumping ground for bodies. There, after American troops conducted sweeps, the number of corpses dropped by a third in September. The new plan is built around that kind of tactic. But the odds are stacked against the corps of bright young officers charged with making the plan work, particularly because their Iraqi partner — the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki — seems to be on an entirely different page. When American officials were debating whether to send more troops in December, I went to see an Iraqi government official. The prospect of more troops infuriated him. More Americans would simply prolong the war, he said.

"If you don't allow the minority to lose, you will carry on forever," he said.

The remarks struck me as a powerful insight into the Shiites' thinking. Abused under Mr. Hussein, they still act like an oppressed class. That means Iraqis are looking into a future of war, at least in the near term. As one young Shiite in Sadr City said to me: "This just has to burn itself out."

Hazim al-Aaraji, a disciple of the renegade Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, understands this. A cleric himself, he is looking for foot soldiers for the war. On a warm October afternoon, as he bustled around his mosque in western Baghdad, he said the ideal disciples would have "an empty mind," and a weapon. Surprised by the word choice, an Iraqi friend I was with stopped him, to clarify his intent. Once again, he used the word "empty."

The frank remark spoke of a new power balance, in which radicals rule and moderates have no voice. For many families I have become attached to here, the country is no longer recognizable.

I met Haifa and her husband, Hassan, both teachers, in a driveway in western Baghdad. They had just found the body of their 12-year-old son, who had been kidnapped and brutally killed, and were frantic with grief. They finally decided to leave Iraq, but its violence tormented them to the end. They paid a man to drive them to Jordan, but he was working with Sunni militants in western Iraq, and pointed out Hassan, a Shiite, to a Sunni gang that stopped the car. Over the next several hours, Haifa waved a tiny Koran at men in masks, pleading for her husband's release, her two remaining children in tow.

Hassan, meanwhile, knelt in a small room, his hands behind his back. His captors shot a man next to him in the neck. Haifa, a Sunni, eventually prevailed on them to let him go. The family returned to Baghdad, then borrowed money to fly to Jordan.

Now they live there, in a tiny basement apartment without windows in a white stone housing project on the side of a hill. Like many Iraqis there, they live in hiding. Residency permits cost $100,000, far beyond their means. Hassan cannot work, nor even risk leaving the house during the day for fear the Jordanian police will deport him.

He tries not to talk to people, afraid someone will recognize his Iraqi accent. He doesn't bargain in the vegetable market. He accepts mean remarks by Jordanian cabdrivers wordlessly.

Most of all, he wants to go home. "But death is waiting for us there," he tells me. "We are homeless. Please help us."

IN his confrontational response to President Bush's State of the Union address on Tuesday, Senator Jim Webb of Virginia said that he was going to focus on only two topics. One, as everyone knew it would be, was Iraq.

But before he turned to the war, the new senator spoke about something else: an economy that he said made it seem "as if we are living in two different countries." In one, stock prices, corporate profits and executive pay are rising. In the other, the middle class is barely scraping by.

Mr. Webb said the situation was reminiscent of the early 20th century, when robber barons were raking in wealth and "dispossessed workers at the bottom were threatening revolt."

It was the sort of speech that one might have expected during a deep economic slump. Yet it came instead as most workers have started receiving significant pay increases for the first time in years and as polls show that most Americans think the economy has grown stronger.

This contrast was arguably the most significant part of the speech. As they plan their strategy on Capitol Hill and begin the 2008 presidential campaign, the leaders of the Democratic Party are betting that the temporary swings of the economic cycle no longer have the political power they once did.

Instead, they say, the economic shocks of recent years — technological change, globalization, the decline of labor unions and business icons like Ford Motor Company — have left many swing voters feeling anxious and insecure about the future.

After years of fighting losing battles against tax cuts, Democrats argue that this economic anxiety has altered the political landscape, making swing voters open to a new role for government — a form of what Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois has called "suburban populism."

With issues like energy policy, immigration and health care having gone largely unaddressed in recent years, Democrats see a way to define themselves as the party that can help Americans survive the 21st-century economy.

An unanswered question, though, is whether suburban populism can still have appeal during good economic times.

"The little ups and downs of the economy are not what's bothering the average American, as much as it is the feeling that there are large forces that buffet them around," said Senator Charles Schumer of New York, whose book laying out an agenda for the party was published last week. "In the past, the attitude was, 'Get government out of the way.' And now it's, 'Gee, I may need it.' "

Amy Klobuchar, a freshman senator from Minnesota, pointed out that her state had one of the strongest economies in the country, yet she still based her winning campaign largely on people's economic worries. "They feel insecure," Ms. Klobuchar said last week. "And the point of this is, they're right."

This strategy certainly has risks. Tax cuts — with a heavy dose of optimism thrown in — have been a much better political bet than populism for decades now, and Republicans are sticking to this script. During his address last week, Mr. Bush described the economy as being "on the move," and he is scheduled to visit Peoria, Ill., this week to call attention to recent wage gains. Republicans are pushing for an extension of the tax cuts passed during Mr. Bush's first term that they say are a major cause of the current boom.

The economy emerged from a recession in late 2001, after the first tax cut went into effect, but wages for most workers still did not keep up with inflation for much of the next few years. Only in recent months has that changed.

In 2006, the average hourly pay of rank-and-file workers, who make up about four-fifths of the work force, rose 4.2 percent, while the consumer price index increased only 2.6 percent. The net result — an inflation-adjusted increase of 1.6 percent — was a bigger annual raise than any that workers received from the late 1970s to the mid-90s.

The direction of wages has historically been one of the best predictors, if not the best, of the public mood, and it, too, has been brightening. In a Gallup Poll conducted in mid-January, the share of respondents calling the economy excellent or good — 52 percent — reached its highest level since the Clinton administration.

But even with the recent increases, the real hourly pay of rank-and-file workers has risen only 3 percent since Mr. Bush took office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over the same span, productivity — that is, the value of what the economy produces per hour — has risen 18 percent.

Except for a few years in the late 1990s, in fact, pay increases have been modest for most of the last three decades, which appears to be contributing to the anxiety. In exit polls on Election Day, fewer than one in three people said they expected life for the next generation of Americans to be better than life today.

But even if suburban populism has some appeal, Democrats have been less clear about how to translate it into policy. During their first weeks in control of the House, they have passed bills to raise the minimum wage, to cut the interest rate on federally subsidized loans to college students and allow government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over the cost of drugs sold through Medicare.

But none of the bills has yet passed the Senate, and even if they do, they are unlikely to have a big effect on most middle-class families — the target audience of the new suburban populism.

Some Democrats, in the party's center and on the left, are starting to push for broader ideas. In his new book, Mr. Schumer calls for biometric employment cards to reduce illegal immigration and a crackdown on tax evasion by the wealthy, among other measures. Tom Vilsack, the former Iowa governor who is running for president, is arguing for a push on new energy technology partly to "elevate our economy above global competition."

It is still not clear how much can be done by a party that, for at least another year, will lack a clear leader. In his speech last week, Senator Webb cited two populist role models, Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, both of whom were presidents, not Congressional leaders.

But the coming year will give the party's leaders a chance to hone its message — and to see how long the current economic boom will last.

Ted Johnson helped the New England Patriots win three of the past five Super Bowls before retiring in 2005. Now, he says, he forgets people's names, misses appointments and, because of an addiction to amphetamines, can become so terrified of the outside world that he locks himself alone inside his Boston apartment in bed with the blinds drawn for days at a time.

"There's something wrong with me," said Mr. Johnson, 34, who spent 10 years in the National Football League as the Patriots' middle linebacker. "There's something wrong with my brain. And I know when it started."

Mr. Johnson's decline began, he said, in August 2002, with a concussion he sustained in a preseason game against the New York Giants. He sustained another four days later during a practice, after Patriots Coach Bill Belichick went against the recommendation of the team's trainer, Johnson said, and submitted him to regular on-field contact.

Mr. Belichick and the Patriots' head trainer at the time, Jim Whalen — each of whom remain in those positions — declined to comment on Mr. Johnson's medical experience with the team or his allegations regarding their actions.

Following his two concussions in August 2002, Mr. Johnson sat out the next two preseason games on the recommendation of a neurologist. After returning to play, Mr. Johnson sustained more concussions of varying severity over the next three seasons, each of them exacerbating the next, according to Mr. Johnson's current neurologist, Dr. Robert Cantu.

Dr. Cantu said that he was convinced Mr. Johnson's cognitive impairment and depression "are related to his previous head injuries, as they are all rather classic postconcussion symptoms." He added, "They are most likely permanent."

Asked for a prognosis of Mr. Johnson's future, Dr. Cantu, the chief of neurosurgery and director of sports medicine at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Mass., said: "Ted already shows the mild cognitive impairment that is characteristic of early Alzheimer's disease. The majority of those symptoms relentlessly progress over time. It could be that at the time he's in his 50s, he could have severe Alzheimer's symptoms."

Mr. Johnson is among a growing number of former players and their relatives who are questioning whether their serious health issues are related to injuries they sustained and the treatment they received as players. Mr. Johnson said he decided to go public with his story after reading in The New York Times two weeks ago about Andre Waters, the former Philadelphia Eagles player who committed suicide last November and was later determined to have had significant brain damage caused by football-related concussions.

Mr. Johnson said he was not suicidal, but that the depression and cognitive problems he had developed since 2002 had worsened to the point that he now takes Adderall, a prescription amphetamine, at two to three times the dosage authorized by his doctors, who have been unaware of this abuse.

When he runs out of these pills, Mr. Johnson said, he shuts himself inside his downtown apartment for days and communicates with no one until a new prescription becomes available. He said he was coming forward with his story so that his friends and family might better understand his situation, and also so that the National Football League might improve its handling of concussions.

While the league's guidelines regarding head injuries have been strengthened over the past decade, the N.F.L.'s record of allowing half of players who sustain concussions to return to the same game remains a subject of medical debate.

"I am afraid of somebody else being the next Andre Waters," said Mr. Johnson, who spent two weeks in February at a psychiatric hospital outside Boston with, he said, no appreciable results. "People are going to question me: 'Are you a whistleblower, what are you doing this for?' You can call it whatever you want about what happened to me. I didn't know the long-term ramifications. You can say that my coach didn't know the long-term, or else he wouldn't have done it. It is going to be hard for me to believe that my trainer didn't know the long-term ramifications, but I am doing this to protect the players from themselves."

The N.F.L. spokesman Greg Aiello said that the league had no knowledge of Johnson's specific situation. Regarding the subject of player concussions in general, he said, "We are very concerned about the issue of concussions, and we are going to continue to look hard at it and do everything possible to protect the health of our players."

At a news conference yesterday in Miami, where the Super Bowl will be held Sunday, Gene Upshaw, the executive director of the National Football League Players Association, spoke in general terms about concussions in the N.F.L. "If a coach or anyone else is saying, 'You don't have a concussion, you get back in there,' you don't have to go, and you shouldn't go," Upshaw said, not speaking about the Johnson case specifically. "You know how you feel. That's what we tried to do throughout the years, is take the coach out of the decision-making. It's the medical people that have to decide."

Mr. Johnson, who has a 2-year-old daughter and a 1-year-old son, is currently in divorce proceedings with his wife, Jackie, a situation that he admitted was compounding his depression.

He was arrested in July on domestic assault-and-battery charges, which were later dropped because his wife declined to testify. Mr. Johnson said that his concussive symptoms and drug addiction not only precipitated his marriage's decline but began several years before it, specifically that preseason of 2002.

According to Patriots medical records that Mr. Johnson shared with The Times, the only notable concussion in his career to that point happened when he played at the University of Colorado in 1993. Against the Giants on Aug. 10, 2002, those records indicate, he sustained a "head injury" — the word concussion was not used — and despite the clearing of symptoms after several minutes on the sideline, he did not return to the game.

Mr. Johnson said that four days later, when full-contact practice resumed, Mr. Whalen issued him a red jersey, the standard signal to all other players that he was not supposed to be hit in any way. About an hour into the practice, Mr. Johnson said, before a set of high-impact running drills, an assistant trainer came out on the field with a standard blue jersey. When he asked for an explanation, Mr. Johnson said, the assistant told him that he was following Mr. Whalen's instructions.

Mr. Johnson, whose relationship with Mr. Belichick had already been strained by a contract dispute, said he interpreted the scene as Mr. Belichick's testing his desire to play, and that he might be cut and lose his $1.1 million salary — N.F.L. contracts are not guaranteed — if he did not follow orders.

"I'm sitting there going, 'God, do I put this thing on?' " Mr. Johnson said. "I put the blue on. I was scared for my job."

Regarding the intimidation he felt at that moment, Mr. Johnson added, "This kind of thing happens all the time in football. That day it was Bill Belichick and Ted Johnson. But it happens all the time."

Several Patriots teammates said they did not recall this incident but invariably testified to the believability of Mr. Johnson, the team captain in 1998 and 2003. Said one former teammate, who insisted on anonymity because he still plays with the Patriots under Mr. Belichick, "If Ted tells you something's going on, something's going on."

Mr. Johnson said that the first play called after he put the blue jersey on, known as "ace-ice," called for one act from him, the middle linebacker: to sprint four yards headlong into the onrushing blocking back. After that collision, Mr. Johnson said, a warm sensation overtook his body, he saw stars, and he felt disoriented as the other players appeared to be moving in slow motion. He never lost consciousness, though, and after several seconds regained his composure and continued to practice "in a bit of a fog" while trying to avoid contact. He said he did not mention anything to anyone until after practice, when he angrily approached Mr. Whalen, the head trainer.

"I said, 'Just so you know, I got another concussion,' " Johnson said. "You could see the blood, like, leave his face. And he was like, 'All right, all right, well, we're going to get you in to see a neurologist.' "

Dr. Lee H. Schwamm, the neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who examined Mr. Johnson, concluded in a memo on Aug. 19, 2002, that Mr. Johnson had sustained a second concussion in that practice. Dr. Schwamm also wrote that, after speaking with Mr. Whalen, that Mr. Whalen "was on the sidelines when he sustained the concussion during the game and assessed him frequently at the sideline," and that "he has kept Mr. Johnson out of contact since that time."

Mr. Johnson said that the next day he spoke with Mr. Belichick about the incident but that they only glossed over it.

"He was vaguely acknowledging that he was aware of what happened," Mr. Johnson said, "and he wanted to just kind of let me know that he knew."

Mr. Johnson missed the next two preseason games, played in the final one, and then, believing he was still going to be left off the active roster for the opening game against Pittsburgh, angrily left camp for two days before returning and meeting with Mr. Belichick and confronting him privately about the blue-jersey incident.

"It's as clear as a bell — 'I had to see if you could play,' " Mr. Johnson recalled Mr. Belichick saying. Minutes later, Mr. Johnson said, Mr. Belichick admitted he had made a mistake by making him wear the blue jersey. "It was a real kind of admittance, but it was only him and I in the room," Mr. Johnson said.

Mr. Johnson sat out the season opener but played the following Sunday against the New York Jets, a game in which Mr. Johnson said he could not remember line formations and was caught out of position because he could not concentrate. After sitting out the next game against Kansas City, Mr. Johnson played against San Diego and had the same problem.

He learned how to manage the disorientation and played the rest of the season but said that, "from that point on, I was getting a lot of these, what I call mini-concussions."

Mr. Johnson added that he did not report these to his trainer or coaches for fear he would be seen as weak.

This continued through the 2003 season, Mr. Johnson said, as he noticed himself feeling increasingly more unfocused, irritable and depressed. Teammates noticed as well, said Willie McGinest, a fellow linebacker who now plays for the Cleveland Browns.

"He was always an upbeat, positive guy," Mr. McGinest said. "After the last few concussions, you could tell he was off at times."

Playing poorly, Mr. Johnson lost his starting job.

In the week before the 2004 Super Bowl, Mr. Johnson said, a friend who supplied amphetamines to several major league baseball pitchers gave him some Adderall pills to cure his lethargy and increase his concentration. "It was the best I had felt in the longest time," Mr. Johnson said. "The old Ted was back."

After playing only sparingly in that Super Bowl, Mr. Johnson began taking larger and larger doses before and throughout the 2004 season, when he regained his starting position at middle linebacker and helped the Patriots win their second consecutive Super Bowl.

The better mood did not last long, he said. The minor concussions — euphemized as "dings" in N.F.L. lingo — that he regularly sustained in practice and in games hurt more than the Adderall could help. The thought of violently tackling a player, he said, "made me physically ill."

"For the first time in my life," he said, "I was scared of going out there and putting my head in there."

Mr. Johnson retired before the 2005 season and briefly worked as a football analyst for WBZ-TV in Boston. But he said his malaise and cognitive problems were only getting worse, and in his attempt to regain some sort of balance, he wound up taking large amounts of antidepressants along with increasing amounts of Adderall, creating a dangerous up-and-down cycle that he realized required professional attention. Last February, he spent two weeks at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric institution in suburban Belmont, Mass.

Mr. Johnson said he felt no better after that experience, and he quickly resumed the Adderall abuse that continues today. He has moved out of his former house during his divorce proceedings and lives in a two-bedroom apartment downtown, which after three months contains dozens of half-open moving boxes.

"Welcome to the glamorous life of a former N.F.L. player," he said. A half-hour later, he stepped into his Range Rover and drove to his local CVS to pick up another bottle of Adderall. The 72 pills of 30 milligrams each are supposed to last nine days, but he knows he will blow through them in four or five.

One of his most maddening frustrations, Mr. Johnson said, is that no tests — from M.R.I.'s to other scans of his brain — have confirmed his condition, causing some people in his life to suspect that he is wallowing in retirement blues. "That's ridiculous," he said, "because I always treated football as a steppingstone for the rest of my life. I used to have incredible drive and ambition. I want to get my M.B.A. But I can't even let myself have a job right now. I don't trust myself."

Dr. Cantu, his neurosurgeon, said he was convinced that Mr. Johnson's condition was primarily caused by successive concussions sustained over short periods of time. He said that M.R.I.'s of Mr. Johnson's brain were clear, but that "the vast majority of individuals with postconcussion syndrome, including depression, cognitive impairment, all the symptoms that Ted has, have normal M.R.I.'s."

The most conclusive method to assess this type of brain damage, Dr. Cantu said, was to examine parts of the brain microscopically for tears and tangles, but such a test is done almost exclusively post-mortem. It was this type of examination that was conducted by a neuropathologist at the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Bennet Omalu, on the brain of Mr. Waters after his suicide, revealing a condition that Dr. Omalu described as that of an 85-year-old with Alzheimer's disease.

"The type of changes that Andre Waters reportedly had most likely Ted has as well," Dr. Cantu said.

Experts in the field of athletic head trauma have grown increasingly confident through studies and anecdotal evidence that repeated concussions, particularly those sustained only days apart, are particularly dangerous. Dr. David Hovda, a professor of neurosurgery and director of the Brain Injury Research Center at U.C.L.A., said, "Repeated concussions — it doesn't matter the severity — have affects that are more than additive, and that last longer."

Sitting in his apartment this week, Mr. Johnson said that he had not considered a lawsuit against Mr. Belichick, any Patriots personnel or the N.F.L. He said that his sole motivation was to raise awareness of the dangers that football players can face regarding concussions.

Asked who was to blame for his condition — Mr. Belichick, Mr. Whalen, himself or the entire culture of the N.F.L. — Mr. Johnson thought for 30 seconds and said he could not decide.

Several hours later, he was riding in an elevator up to a consultation with Dr. Cantu. As the door opened on the seventh floor, a middle-aged man walked out and smiled warmly at Mr. Johnson. "We missed you this year," he said.

"Thanks, man," Mr. Johnson said with a grin and a nod. Later, Mr. Johnson said something else went through his troubled mind at that moment.

"I miss me, too," he said.

DELRAY BEACH, Fla., Feb. 1 — Gov. Charlie Crist announced plans on Thursday to abandon the touch-screen voting machines that many of Florida's counties installed after the disputed 2000 presidential election. The state will instead adopt a system of casting paper ballots counted by scanning machines in time for the 2008 presidential election.

Voting experts said Florida's move, coupled with new federal voting legislation expected to pass this year, could be the death knell for the paperless electronic touch-screen machines. If as expected the Florida Legislature approves the $32.5 million cost of the change, it would be the nation's biggest repudiation yet of touch-screen voting, which was widely embraced after the 2000 recount as a state-of-the-art means of restoring confidence that every vote would count.

Several counties around the country, including Cuyahoga in Ohio and Sarasota in Florida, are moving toward exchanging touch-screen machines for ones that provide a paper trail. But Florida could become the first state that invested heavily in the recent rush to touch screens to reject them so sweepingly.

"Florida is like a synonym for election problems; it's the Bermuda Triangle of elections," said Warren Stewart, policy director of VoteTrust USA, a nonprofit group that says optical scanners are more reliable than touch screens. "For Florida to be clearly contemplating moving away from touch screens to the greatest extent possible is truly significant."

Other states that rushed to buy the touch-screen machines are also abandoning them. Earlier this week, the Virginia Senate passed a bill that would phase out the machines as they wore out, and replace them with optical scanners. The Maryland legislature also seems determined to order a switch from the paperless touch screens, though it is not clear yet if it will require the use of optical scanners or just allow paper printers to be added to the touch screens.

On Monday, Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, plans to introduce a bill in Congress that would require all voting machines nationwide to produce paper records through which voters can verify that their ballots were recorded correctly. A majority of House members have endorsed the proposal, and the changes have strong support among Senate Democrats. Mr. Holt's bill would also substantially toughen the requirements for the touch-screen machines that have printers, and experts say this could give even more impetus to the shift toward the optical scanning systems.

Mr. Crist, a Republican, at times drew whoops and applause when he announced his plan at the South County Civic Center in Palm Beach County, the epicenter of the 2000 election standoff and home of the infamous "butterfly ballot" that confused many voters. The touch screens had replaced the punch-card systems that caused widespread problems that year.

"You should, when you go vote, be able to have a record of it," Mr. Crist told a few hundred mostly older citizens at the civic center, in Delray Beach, where many residents said they accidentally voted for Patrick J. Buchanan in 2000 instead of Al Gore because of the confusing ballot design. "That's all we're proposing today. It's not very complicated; it is in fact common sense. Most importantly, it is the right thing to do."

Mr. Crist's renunciation of touch-screen voting one month after he replaced Jeb Bush as governor of the nation's fourth-most-populous state, suggested that the fight for paper voting records, long a pet project of Democrats, might become more bipartisan. Mr. Crist made the announcement with Representative Robert Wexler, a Democrat from Delray Beach who has ardently led the movement for a paper trail and has attacked Republicans along the way.

"I support this plan 100 percent," Mr. Wexler said before introducing Mr. Crist. "This governor means what he says, and he's coming to Tallahassee and he's spreading the message throughout Florida that this isn't about Republican or Democrat, it's not about this ideology or that; it's about unifying people and doing what's right for the people of Florida."

The 15 Florida counties that have adopted touch-screen voting in recent years, including Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Hillsborough, would move to optical-scan voting under the proposal before the presidential election of 2008. The plan would give them the option, however, of using touch-screen machines during the state's two-week early voting period that precedes Election Day, if the machines are modified to provide a paper trail. Those counties represent 54 percent of the state's registered voters. Broward County alone has bought about 6,000 touch-screen machines in recent years, and Palm Beach County has about 4,500.

Mr. Crist said county election supervisors would explore how to make optical-scan voting easier for blind people and for those who speak foreign languages. In some cases, they have been able to vote without assistance on the touch-screen machines.

Asked how he felt about discarding tens of millions of dollars worth of touch-screen machines just years after they were acquired, Mr. Crist said, "The price of freedom is not cheap. The importance of a democratic system of voting that we can trust, that we can have confidence in, is incredibly important."

Election experts estimate that paperless electronic machines were used by about 30 percent of voters nationwide in 2006. But their reliability has increasingly come under scrutiny, as has the difficulty of doing recounts without a paper trail. Federal technology experts concluded late last year that paperless touch-screen machines could not be secured from tampering.

Some states had bought early versions of the paperless machines before the 2000 recount, and one of them, New Mexico, switched last year to optical scanners. But most of the machines in other states were purchased with federal money provided under a 2002 law that required states to upgrade from old punch-card and lever systems.

New York is planning to buy either screens with printers or optical scanners, New Jersey is adding paper trails to its touch screens and Connecticut is buying the optical scanners. A recent survey by Election Data Services, a Washington consulting firm, estimated that 36 percent of the nation's counties have bought electronic machines, including some with printers attached, while 56 percent have the optical scan systems.

Mr. Holt said his bill would require the return to paper ballots by next year's presidential primaries, and it would authorize $300 million in federal money to upgrade the machines. Some state and county election officials say it could be difficult to make such sweeping changes by then.

But, Mr. Holt said, "it depends on how badly we want to do it. The public is getting very impatient here."

In Sarasota County last November, more than 18,000 voters who used touch-screen machines did not have their votes recorded in the close Congressional race between Vern Buchanan, the Republican, and Christine Jennings, the Democrat. Mr. Buchanan took office last month after a recount gave him a 369-vote victory, but Ms. Jennings has sued.

Former Governor Bush, President Bush's younger brother, generally defended touch-screen voting during his tenure and said skeptics had fallen prey to "conspiracy theories." But leading up to the 2004 presidential election, the Republican Party of Florida sent out fliers urging voters to use absentee ballots because of the absence of a paper trail.

Experts say the optical scanners are less expensive than the touch-screen systems. But Kimball W. Brace, the president of Election Data Services, said optical scanning systems had had a slightly higher rate of voter error than touch screens.

EL MIRAGE, Ariz., Jan. 31 — To neighbors, Casey Price was a seventh grader with acne and a baseball cap who lived an unremarkable life among a bevy of male relatives.

He built the occasional skateboard ramp and did wheelies on his bicycle down the streets of this subdivision of stucco homes north of Phoenix.

In nearby Surprise, where Casey was enrolled as a 12-year-old in a public school for four months, he was regarded as a shy, average student with chronic attendance problems. A man identified as his uncle had registered him, attended curriculum night and e-mailed his teachers about homework assignments.

Now Casey is in jail, and his former neighbors and classmates have learned the unthinkable: Not only is Casey not Casey — his real name is Neil H. Rodreick II — but he is also a 29-year-old convicted sex offender who kept a youthful appearance with the aid of razors and makeup.

And the men known as his uncle, grandfather and cousin, who until recently shared a three-bedroom house with him here, were not family at all, but a web of convicted sex offenders and predators, law enforcement officials say, preying in part on one another.

A retracing of Mr. Rodreick's tracks over the past several years shows that he is under investigation in three states. The authorities in four jurisdictions say he repeatedly failed to register as a sex offender, housed a large cache of child pornography in his computer and, based on videos found by the police, had sex with at least one boy.

"Obviously there are a lot of emotions to work through," said Mindy Newlin, the mother of a kindergartener at Imagine Charter School, the school in Surprise where Mr. Rodreick posed as Casey. "We are just shocked."

Robin Kaiser's daughter Kaitlin shared a class with "Casey," but he failed to make an impression, Ms. Kaiser said. "She remembers him, that he was quiet and sat in the back of the classroom," she said. "She said he looked like he had been held back."

Janet R. Lincoln, the public defender for Yavapai County, who represents Mr. Rodreick and the other three men, did not return multiple phone calls. A receptionist in her office said Ms. Lincoln would have no comment. The men have been indicted on numerous counts and are scheduled to appear in court in late February; they have already pleaded not guilty to charges of fraud and failing to register as sex offenders.

Mr. Rodreick spent seven years in prison in Oklahoma for making lewd and indecent proposals to two 6-year-old boys. After being released in 2002, law enforcement officials said, he was able to convince Lonnie Stiffler, 61, and Robert J. Snow, 43, who had been trolling the Internet for boys, that he was a minor.

In 2005, he talked the two men into taking him from Oklahoma to live with them in Arizona, where Mr. Stiffler posed as Mr. Rodreick's grandfather and Mr. Snow as his uncle, and both men regularly had sex with him, the authorities said. Another man living in the house, Brian Nellis, 34, a sex offender Mr. Rodreick had met in prison, is believed to have aided Mr. Rodreick in the ruse, the authorities said.

Mr. Rodreick continued the charade as a minor for nearly two years, the authorities said, registering at four charter schools in Arizona, until this month, when school administrators in Chino Valley called the sheriff.

The police and school officials in each location where "Casey" enrolled said they knew of no children harmed, although the indictment against Mr. Rodreick includes an assault count. The authorities are trying to determine, with the help of videos confiscated from the men, if there were victims in the schools.

"With boys it is a really tough deal," said Lt. Van Gillock of the Police Department in El Reno, Okla., where Mr. Rodreick is believed to have posed as a 12-year-old to ingratiate himself with boys at church. "If they did it voluntarily, they have the stigma of homosexuality, and if it is forced, well, boys are supposed to be tough and the things the boys have on them gives them an embarrassment factor."

Though many parents have publicly praised the Surprise school's handling of the deception, Mr. Rodreick's enrollment has raised questions about admissions procedures, which officials at Imagine, one of the state's largest charter schools, said they were reviewing. Arizona, the nation's fastest-growing state, is a leader in charter school enrollment, with more than 450 schools that account for 8 percent of the state's total student body.

"He probably thought that a charter school was easier," said Candace Foth, another parent in Surprise. "It is not really difficult to enroll."

Mr. Rodreick's time in Arizona was the latest episode in a life speckled with disappointment, crimes and estrangement, according to relatives and law enforcement officials.

When he was growing up in Oklahoma, he was sexually abused by neighbors, said his mother's sister, Jan Bautista, with whom he lived briefly after his release from prison in 2002.

He was 18 in 1996 when the authorities in Chickasha, Okla., charged him with making lewd and indecent proposals to two 6-year-old boys. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and released after serving 7.

From there, Ms. Bautista said, he made his way to San Bernardino County in California, where he stayed with her for about two months. Ms. Bautista said she asked Mr. Rodreick to leave after she found child pornography on her computer and suspected him of lewd acts toward a child. She said she turned her computer over to the sheriff.

"I really hate this man," she said. "I really do. I hope they keep him in prison the rest of his life, because I know he is never going to get well."

Mr. Rodreick next made his way to Kingfisher County in Oklahoma, where, according to the sheriff, Dennis Banther, he registered as a sex offender. Soon, he was joined in his mobile home in a secluded area by Mr. Nellis, who had served three years in prison after a conviction for lewd molestation, Sheriff Banther said. The two gravitated among fast-food restaurant jobs, the sheriff said, and were seen at a school playground, a library and parks.

The two left Kingfisher County in 2003 for El Reno, Okla., and trouble followed. In 2005, Lieutenant Gillock of the El Reno Police Department got a call from a computer rental store that had repossessed a computer Mr. Nellis had rented and found child pornography — more than 1,000 images and 150 videos.

While looking for Mr. Rodreick, Lieutenant Gillock stumbled upon his new life. He learned he had been posing as a 12-year-old named Casey and befriending families at a local church. He had spent the night with at least one boy, the lieutenant said, and traveled to the Grand Canyon, with Mr. Nellis in tow as his uncle, with another boy. And since at least late 2004, he said, Mr. Rodreick had been receiving Western Union money transfers from Mr. Stiffler.

Mr. Stiffler is the only one of the four who has not been convicted of a sexual offense, according to officials in Yavapai County. He spent most of his life in New Jersey, some of it married to a woman named Jill, who died in 1984, and with whom he had a daughter, according to Karen Svecz, his wife's sister.

Mr. Snow, who law enforcement officials say has been convicted of a sexual offense in California, lived mostly there until about 1985, when he moved to Arizona.

When Mr. Rodreick arrived in Arizona, he is believed to have first enrolled at the Shelby School in Peyson, where administrators say he attended under the name of Casy Rodreick for 21 days in 2005.

The next stop was Surprise, where the same "uncle" played the role of enroller again, presenting Mr. Rodreick as a 12-year-old. His concocted name, Casey Price, was that of a child in Oklahoma, the authorities there said.

"He absolutely looked age-appropriate," said Rhonda Cagle, a spokeswoman for Imagine Charter School, of Mr. Rodreick, who is listed on the Oklahoma Department of Corrections Web site as 5 feet 8 inches tall and 120 pounds. "We have several seventh-grade students who are taller and of a larger build than this individual."

Ms. Cagle said he was quiet and participated in no after school activities, eventually being expelled by school officials for poor attendance.

"He took all of the subjects our students take — math, social studies," she said. "By all accounts from the teachers, he was fairly quiet and withdrawn. He turned in homework, certainly didn't come off as brilliant or as someone needing extra help."

After another effort to enroll in a school in Prescott Valley, the police say, Mr. Rodreick headed a bit north, to the Mingus Springs Charter School in Chino Valley, and this time, his "grandfather," Mr. Stiffler, took him to enroll on Jan. 16 toward the end of the day.

But administrators and staff members quickly grew suspicious, said Dawn Gonzales, the school director.

"The person posing as the child obviously looked older than 12," Ms. Gonzales said, although he was allowed to start class while they looked over his paperwork. Things were not right, there, either. Some records had Casey, others Casy. Different birth dates emerged.

The next day came, and so did Casey. "He did have the demeanor of a kid," Ms. Gonzales said. "He played that part very well. He appeared to be very shy. He kept his head down and spoke softly."

It wasn't working. "Every adult that encountered him said something here is not right," she said. "He just looked older. They kept saying, 'Are you sure he is 12?' "

When information on his enrollment forms turned out to be fiction, school officials, believing they had an abducted older child on their hands, called the Yavapai sheriff's office.

"In my wildest imagination I could not have dreamt up," what was discovered, Ms. Gonzales said.

The authorities said Mr. Stiffler and Mr. Snow were shocked, too, and angry about being duped by an adult posing as a minor.

Ms. Cagle said her school in Surprise learned about their "Casey" on the evening news. "Needless to say, our staff is devastated," she said. "This individual violated a sense of community that we all share. This is something that is bigger than our school. It affects the way we live and the way we look at each other."

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates, Jan. 31 — In this land of big ambition and deep pockets, planners on Wednesday unveiled designs for an audacious multibillion-dollar cultural district whose like has never been seen in the Arab world.

The designs presented here in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates and one of the world's top oil producers, are to be built on an island just off the coast and include three museums designed by the celebrity architects Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and Tadao Ando, as well as a sprawling, spaceshiplike performing arts center designed by Zaha Hadid.

Mr. Gehry's building is intended for an Adu Dhabi branch of the Guggenheim Museum featuring contemporary art and Mr. Nouvel's for a classical museum, possibly an outpost of the Louvre Museum in Paris. Mr. Ando's is to house a maritime museum reflecting the history of the Arabian gulf.

The project also calls for a national museum and a biennial exhibition space composed of 19 pavilions designed by smaller names and snaking along a canal that cuts through the island. Art schools and an art college are also planned.

In all, the project, known as the Cultural District of Saadiyat Island, would create an exhibition space intended to turn this once-sleepy desert city along the Persian Gulf into an international arts capital and tourist destination. If completed according to plan sometime in the next decade, consultants predict, it could be the world's largest single arts-and-culture development project in recent memory.

At times astonishing, at times controversial, the district is part of a far broader $27 billion development project on the island that includes hotels, resorts, golf courses and housing that could accommodate 125,000 residents or more.

The museum designs, displayed at an exhibition attended by dignitaries and the United Arab Emirates leadership, are a striking departure from Abu Dhabi's crumbling 1970s-style concrete buildings and more modern glass-and-steel high-rises. Still, because Saadiyat Island is undeveloped, architects faced the unusual challenge of an aesthetic and contextual tabula rasa.

The daring designs, some teeming with life and color, others more starkly formal, have one aspect in common: it probably would be hard to build them all in one district anywhere else.

"It's like a clean slate in a country full of resources," said Mr. Gehry, who appeared at the exhibition to show off his model for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. "It's an opportunity for the world of art and culture that is not available anywhere else because you're building a desert enclave without the contextual constraints of a city."

No cost estimates were given for the buildings unveiled on Wednesday, but each is certain to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

For the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Mr. Gehry envisions a 320,000-square-foot structure with 130,000 square feet of exhibition space built around a cluster of galleries, a space far larger than his Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, which cost about $100 million. A jumble of blocks, glass awnings and open spaces, the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim would be centered on a core of galleries of varying height atop one another and forming a courtyard. A second ring of larger galleries is followed by a third ring of galleries housing raw industrial-looking spaces with exposed lighting and mechanical systems.

The design for the classical museum enters into a dialogue with its surroundings, suggesting a submerged archaeological field with a cluster of one-room buildings placed along a promenade. The complex is covered by a massive translucent dome etched in patterns that allow diffused light into the spaces below.

Mr. Ando's maritime museum design borrows from the maritime history of the emirates, with a reflective surface merging sea and land and a shiplike interior with floating decks.

Ms. Hadid's performing arts center concept, which seems part spaceship, part organism, is to house a music hall, concert hall, opera house and two theaters, one seating up to 6,300. Transparent and airy, the center hovers over the azure waters of the Persian Gulf.

"It's an inspiration from nature and an organic design, with a fluid design, as well as a space with good sound," Ms. Hadid said.

Abu Dhabi's sheiks dreamed up this sweeping cultural project in late 2004, after brainstorming ways to attract more tourism to the emirate, which is the richest of the seven in the United Arab Emirates confederation, but has largely missed out on the flood of visitors attracted by its neighbor Dubai.

Flush with cash from the oil boom, the emirate has embarked on a development spree intended to update its infrastructure after years of limited development. Abu Dhabi's tourist board insists it is not trying to one-up Dubai, but instead wants to complement Dubai's emphasis on other forms of entertainment.

"The real strategic decision here is that Dubai has established itself as a tourist destination, and Abu Dhabi is complementing what Dubai is doing," said Barry Lord, president of Lord Cultural Resources, which has helped manage the development of the cultural project. "Cultural tourists are wealthier, older, more educated, and they spend more. From an economic view, this makes sense."

Abu Dhabi's Tourism Development and Investment Company announced a deal to build the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi last year. Recently it reached a $1 billion accord to rent the name, art and expertise of the Louvre for a museum to be built on the island. Protests quickly arose in France that that country was selling its patrimony to the highest bidder. The emirate's tourism officials played down the Louvre plan on Wednesday, insisting the deal was not final.

Mr. Lord noted that the arts project was taking shape against the backdrop of continued turbulence in the Middle East.

"They are very conscious here that this can change the cultural climate in the region," Mr. Lord said. "To be able to add high culture at the high end of international culture, this is a tremendous change."

After oil booms in the 1970s and 80s in which their proceeds were not always used wisely, Persian Gulf governments are now focusing on spending their surpluses on infrastructure projects and real-estate development. A new generation of leaders in the gulf, especially in the emirates, where a new ruler was installed only in late 2004 and where several ministers are still in their 30s, has looked beyond traditional real-estate projects to efforts that would help their cities stand out on the world stage.

Other Persian Gulf countries have turned to the arts too. In Qatar the final touches are being added to I. M. Pei's latest structure, the Qatar Museum, built just off the coast of the capital, Doha, to house a new Islamic arts collection. In Sharjah, another emirate, which has fashioned itself as the cultural capital of the Persian Gulf, the Sharjah Art Museum continues to expand its collection and is planning its eighth biennial. And even Dubai is building a Culture Village, centered on an opera house also designed by Ms. Hadid and other arts and culture institutions.

"This is not just about tourism; it also has global cultural dimensions," Mubarak Muhairi, the director general of the Abu Dhabi tourism authority, said. "We believe the best vehicle for crossing borders is art. And this region is in need of such artistic initiatives."

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I'm tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I'll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won't kill you, though it's better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you're much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That's what I mean by the recommendation to eat "food." Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Uh-oh. Things are suddenly sounding a little more complicated, aren't they? Sorry. But that's how it goes as soon as you try to get to the bottom of the whole vexing question of food and health. Before long, a dense cloud bank of confusion moves in. Sooner or later, everything solid you thought you knew about the links between diet and health gets blown away in the gust of the latest study.

Last winter came the news that a low-fat diet, long believed to protect against breast cancer, may do no such thing — this from the monumental, federally financed Women's Health Initiative, which has also found no link between a low-fat diet and rates of coronary disease. The year before we learned that dietary fiber might not, as we had been confidently told, help prevent colon cancer. Just last fall two prestigious studies on omega-3 fats published at the same time presented us with strikingly different conclusions. While the Institute of Medicine stated that "it is uncertain how much these omega-3s contribute to improving health" (and they might do the opposite if you get them from mercury-contaminated fish), a Harvard study declared that simply by eating a couple of servings of fish each week (or by downing enough fish oil), you could cut your risk of dying from a heart attack by more than a third — a stunningly hopeful piece of news. It's no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of 2007, as food scientists micro-encapsulate fish oil and algae oil and blast them into such formerly all-terrestrial foods as bread and tortillas, milk and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, sprout fishy new health claims. (Remember the rule?)

By now you're probably registering the cognitive dissonance of the supermarket shopper or science-section reader, as well as some nostalgia for the simplicity and solidity of the first few sentences of this essay. Which I'm still prepared to defend against the shifting winds of nutritional science and food-industry marketing. But before I do that, it might be useful to figure out how we arrived at our present state of nutritional confusion and anxiety.

The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and — ahem — journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, distinctly risky if you're a nutritionist and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, "Eat more fruits and vegetables"?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition — much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.

FROM FOODS TO NUTRIENTS

It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American supermarket, gradually to be replaced by "nutrients," which are not the same thing. Where once the familiar names of recognizable comestibles — things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies — claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the aisles, now new terms like "fiber" and "cholesterol" and "saturated fat" rose to large-type prominence. More important than mere foods, the presence or absence of these invisible substances was now generally believed to confer health benefits on their eaters. Foods by comparison were coarse, old-fashioned and decidedly unscientific things — who could say what was in them, really? But nutrients — those chemical compounds and minerals in foods that nutritionists have deemed important to health — gleamed with the promise of scientific certainty; eat more of the right ones, fewer of the wrong, and you would live longer and avoid chronic diseases.

Nutrients themselves had been around, as a concept, since the early 19th century, when the English doctor and chemist William Prout identified what came to be called the "macronutrients": protein, fat and carbohydrates. It was thought that that was pretty much all there was going on in food, until doctors noticed that an adequate supply of the big three did not necessarily keep people nourished. At the end of the 19th century, British doctors were puzzled by the fact that Chinese laborers in the Malay states were dying of a disease called beriberi, which didn't seem to afflict Tamils or native Malays. The mystery was solved when someone pointed out that the Chinese ate "polished," or white, rice, while the others ate rice that hadn't been mechanically milled. A few years later, Casimir Funk, a Polish chemist, discovered the "essential nutrient" in rice husks that protected against beriberi and called it a "vitamine," the first micronutrient. Vitamins brought a kind of glamour to the science of nutrition, and though certain sectors of the population began to eat by its expert lights, it really wasn't until late in the 20th century that nutrients managed to push food aside in the popular imagination of what it means to eat.

No single event marked the shift from eating food to eating nutrients, though in retrospect a little-noticed political dust-up in Washington in 1977 seems to have helped propel American food culture down this dimly lighted path. Responding to an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet — including heart disease, cancer and diabetes — a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held hearings on the problem and prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called "Dietary Goals for the United States." The committee learned that while rates of coronary heart disease had soared in America since World War II, other cultures that consumed traditional diets based largely on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.

Naïvely putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat. The committee's recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food — the committee had advised Americans to actually "reduce consumption of meat" — was replaced by artful compromise: "Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake."

A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same. First, the stark message to "eat less" of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don't look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless — and politically unconnected — substance that may or may not lurk in them called "saturated fat."

The linguistic capitulation did nothing to rescue McGovern from his blunder; the very next election, in 1980, the beef lobby helped rusticate the three-term senator, sending an unmistakable warning to anyone who would challenge the American diet, and in particular the big chunk of animal protein sitting in the middle of its plate. Henceforth, government dietary guidelines would shun plain talk about whole foods, each of which has its trade association on Capitol Hill, and would instead arrive clothed in scientific euphemism and speaking of nutrients, entities that few Americans really understood but that lack powerful lobbies in Washington. This was precisely the tack taken by the National Academy of Sciences when it issued its landmark report on diet and cancer in 1982. Organized nutrient by nutrient in a way guaranteed to offend no food group, it codified the official new dietary language. Industry and media followed suit, and terms like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, monounsaturated, carbohydrate, fiber, polyphenols, amino acids and carotenes soon colonized much of the cultural space previously occupied by the tangible substance formerly known as food. The Age of Nutritionism had arrived.

THE RISE OF NUTRITIONISM

The first thing to understand about nutritionism — I first encountered the term in the work of an Australian sociologist of science named Gyorgy Scrinis — is that it is not quite the same as nutrition. As the "ism" suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather, all pervasive and virtually inescapable. Still, we can try.

In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. From this basic premise flow several others. Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. To enter a world in which you dine on unseen nutrients, you need lots of expert help.

But expert help to do what, exactly? This brings us to another unexamined assumption: that the whole point of eating is to maintain and promote bodily health. Hippocrates's famous injunction to "let food be thy medicine" is ritually invoked to support this notion. I'll leave the premise alone for now, except to point out that it is not shared by all cultures and that the experience of these other cultures suggests that, paradoxically, viewing food as being about things other than bodily health — like pleasure, say, or socializing — makes people no less healthy; indeed, there's some reason to believe that it may make them more healthy. This is what we usually have in mind when we speak of the "French paradox" — the fact that a population that eats all sorts of unhealthful nutrients is in many ways healthier than we Americans are. So there is at least a question as to whether nutritionism is actually any good for you.

Another potentially serious weakness of nutritionist ideology is that it has trouble discerning qualitative distinctions between foods. So fish, beef and chicken through the nutritionists' lens become mere delivery systems for varying quantities of fats and proteins and whatever other nutrients are on their scope. Similarly, any qualitative distinctions between processed foods and whole foods disappear when your focus is on quantifying the nutrients they contain (or, more precisely, the known nutrients).

This is a great boon for manufacturers of processed food, and it helps explain why they have been so happy to get with the nutritionism program. In the years following McGovern's capitulation and the 1982 National Academy report, the food industry set about re-engineering thousands of popular food products to contain more of the nutrients that science and government had deemed the good ones and less of the bad, and by the late '80s a golden era of food science was upon us. The Year of Eating Oat Bran — also known as 1988 — served as a kind of coming-out party for the food scientists, who succeeded in getting the material into nearly every processed food sold in America. Oat bran's moment on the dietary stage didn't last long, but the pattern had been established, and every few years since then a new oat bran has taken its turn under the marketing lights. (Here comes omega-3!)

By comparison, the typical real food has more trouble competing under the rules of nutritionism, if only because something like a banana or an avocado can't easily change its nutritional stripes (though rest assured the genetic engineers are hard at work on the problem). So far, at least, you can't put oat bran in a banana. So depending on the reigning nutritional orthodoxy, the avocado might be either a high-fat food to be avoided (Old Think) or a food high in monounsaturated fat to be embraced (New Think). The fate of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the nutritional weather, while the processed foods are simply reformulated. That's why when the Atkins mania hit the food industry, bread and pasta were given a quick redesign (dialing back the carbs; boosting the protein), while the poor unreconstructed potatoes and carrots were left out in the cold.

Of course it's also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.

EAT RIGHT, GET FATTER

So nutritionism is good for business. But is it good for us? You might think that a national fixation on nutrients would lead to measurable improvements in the public health. But for that to happen, the underlying nutritional science, as well as the policy recommendations (and the journalism) based on that science, would have to be sound. This has seldom been the case.

Consider what happened immediately after the 1977 "Dietary Goals" — McGovern's masterpiece of politico-nutritionist compromise. In the wake of the panel's recommendation that we cut down on saturated fat, a recommendation seconded by the 1982 National Academy report on cancer, Americans did indeed change their diets, endeavoring for a quarter-century to do what they had been told. Well, kind of. The industrial food supply was promptly reformulated to reflect the official advice, giving us low-fat pork, low-fat Snackwell's and all the low-fat pasta and high-fructose (yet low-fat!) corn syrup we could consume. Which turned out to be quite a lot. Oddly, America got really fat on its new low-fat diet — indeed, many date the current obesity and diabetes epidemic to the late 1970s, when Americans began binging on carbohydrates, ostensibly as a way to avoid the evils of fat.

This story has been told before, notably in these pages ("What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" by Gary Taubes, July 7, 2002), but it's a little more complicated than the official version suggests. In that version, which inspired the most recent Atkins craze, we were told that America got fat when, responding to bad scientific advice, it shifted its diet from fats to carbs, suggesting that a re-evaluation of the two nutrients is in order: fat doesn't make you fat; carbs do. (Why this should have come as news is a mystery: as long as people have been raising animals for food, they have fattened them on carbs.)

But there are a couple of problems with this revisionist picture. First, while it is true that Americans post-1977 did begin binging on carbs, and that fat as a percentage of total calories in the American diet declined, we never did in fact cut down on our consumption of fat. Meat consumption actually climbed. We just heaped a bunch more carbs onto our plates, obscuring perhaps, but not replacing, the expanding chunk of animal protein squatting in the center.

How did that happen? I would submit that the ideology of nutritionism deserves as much of the blame as the carbohydrates themselves do — that and human nature. By framing dietary advice in terms of good and bad nutrients, and by burying the recommendation that we should eat less of any particular food, it was easy for the take-home message of the 1977 and 1982 dietary guidelines to be simplified as follows: Eat more low-fat foods. And that is what we did. We're always happy to receive a dispensation to eat more of something (with the possible exception of oat bran), and one of the things nutritionism reliably gives us is some such dispensation: low-fat cookies then, low-carb beer now. It's hard to imagine the low-fat craze taking off as it did if McGovern's original food-based recommendations had stood: eat fewer meat and dairy products. For how do you get from that stark counsel to the idea that another case of Snackwell's is just what the doctor ordered?

BAD SCIENCE

But if nutritionism leads to a kind of false consciousness in the mind of the eater, the ideology can just as easily mislead the scientist. Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, an approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. "The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science," points out Marion Nestle, the New York University nutritionist, "is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle."

If nutritional scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done: scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you're a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.

Scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful tool, but it can mislead us too, especially when applied to something as complex as, on the one side, a food, and on the other, a human eater. It encourages us to take a mechanistic view of that transaction: put in this nutrient; get out that physiological result. Yet people differ in important ways. Some populations can metabolize sugars better than others; depending on your evolutionary heritage, you may or may not be able to digest the lactose in milk. The specific ecology of your intestines helps determine how efficiently you digest what you eat, so that the same input of 100 calories may yield more or less energy depending on the proportion of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes living in your gut. There is nothing very machinelike about the human eater, and so to think of food as simply fuel is wrong.

Also, people don't eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain. Researchers have long believed, based on epidemiological comparisons of different populations, that a diet high in fruits and vegetables confers some protection against cancer. So naturally they ask, What nutrients in those plant foods are responsible for that effect? One hypothesis is that the antioxidants in fresh produce — compounds like beta carotene, lycopene, vitamin E, etc. — are the X factor. It makes good sense: these molecules (which plants produce to protect themselves from the highly reactive oxygen atoms produced in photosynthesis) vanquish the free radicals in our bodies, which can damage DNA and initiate cancers. At least that's how it seems to work in the test tube. Yet as soon as you remove these useful molecules from the context of the whole foods they're found in, as we've done in creating antioxidant supplements, they don't work at all. Indeed, in the case of beta carotene ingested as a supplement, scientists have discovered that it actually increases the risk of certain cancers. Big oops.

What's going on here? We don't know. It could be the vagaries of human digestion. Maybe the fiber (or some other component) in a carrot protects the antioxidant molecules from destruction by stomach acids early in the digestive process. Or it could be that we isolated the wrong antioxidant. Beta is just one of a whole slew of carotenes found in common vegetables; maybe we focused on the wrong one. Or maybe beta carotene works as an antioxidant only in concert with some other plant chemical or process; under other circumstances, it may behave as a pro-oxidant.

Indeed, to look at the chemical composition of any common food plant is to realize just how much complexity lurks within it. Here's a list of just the antioxidants that have been identified in garden-variety thyme:

4-Terpineol, alanine, anethole, apigenin, ascorbic acid, beta carotene, caffeic acid, camphene, carvacrol, chlorogenic acid, chrysoeriol, eriodictyol, eugenol, ferulic acid, gallic acid, gamma-terpinene isochlorogenic acid, isoeugenol, isothymonin, kaempferol, labiatic acid, lauric acid, linalyl acetate, luteolin, methionine, myrcene, myristic acid, naringenin, oleanolic acid, p-coumoric acid, p-hydroxy-benzoic acid, palmitic acid, rosmarinic acid, selenium, tannin, thymol, tryptophan, ursolic acid, vanillic acid.

This is what you're ingesting when you eat food flavored with thyme. Some of these chemicals are broken down by your digestion, but others are going on to do undetermined things to your body: turning some gene's expression on or off, perhaps, or heading off a free radical before it disturbs a strand of DNA deep in some cell. It would be great to know how this all works, but in the meantime we can enjoy thyme in the knowledge that it probably doesn't do any harm (since people have been eating it forever) and that it may actually do some good (since people have been eating it forever) and that even if it does nothing, we like the way it tastes.

It's also important to remind ourselves that what reductive science can manage to perceive well enough to isolate and study is subject to change, and that we have a tendency to assume that what we can see is all there is to see. When William Prout isolated the big three macronutrients, scientists figured they now understood food and what the body needs from it; when the vitamins were isolated a few decades later, scientists thought, O.K., now we really understand food and what the body needs to be healthy; today it's the polyphenols and carotenoids that seem all-important. But who knows what the hell else is going on deep in the soul of a carrot?

The good news is that, to the carrot eater, it doesn't matter. That's the great thing about eating food as compared with nutrients: you don't need to fathom a carrot's complexity to reap its benefits.

The case of the antioxidants points up the dangers in taking a nutrient out of the context of food; as Nestle suggests, scientists make a second, related error when they study the food out of the context of the diet. We don't eat just one thing, and when we are eating any one thing, we're not eating another. We also eat foods in combinations and in orders that can affect how they're absorbed. Drink coffee with your steak, and your body won't be able to fully absorb the iron in the meat. The trace of limestone in the corn tortilla unlocks essential amino acids in the corn that would otherwise remain unavailable. Some of those compounds in that sprig of thyme may well affect my digestion of the dish I add it to, helping to break down one compound or possibly stimulate production of an enzyme to detoxify another. We have barely begun to understand the relationships among foods in a cuisine.

But we do understand some of the simplest relationships, like the zero-sum relationship: that if you eat a lot of meat you're probably not eating a lot of vegetables. This simple fact may explain why populations that eat diets high in meat have higher rates of coronary heart disease and cancer than those that don't. Yet nutritionism encourages us to look elsewhere for the explanation: deep within the meat itself, to the culpable nutrient, which scientists have long assumed to be the saturated fat. So they are baffled when large-population studies, like the Women's Health Initiative, fail to find that reducing fat intake significantly reduces the incidence of heart disease or cancer.

Of course thanks to the low-fat fad (inspired by the very same reductionist fat hypothesis), it is entirely possible to reduce your intake of saturated fat without significantly reducing your consumption of animal protein: just drink the low-fat milk and order the skinless chicken breast or the turkey bacon. So maybe the culprit nutrient in meat and dairy is the animal protein itself, as some researchers now hypothesize. (The Cornell nutritionist T. Colin Campbell argues as much in his recent book, "The China Study.") Or, as the Harvard epidemiologist Walter C. Willett suggests, it could be the steroid hormones typically present in the milk and meat; these hormones (which occur naturally in meat and milk but are often augmented in industrial production) are known to promote certain cancers.

But people worried about their health needn't wait for scientists to settle this question before deciding that it might be wise to eat more plants and less meat. This is of course precisely what the McGovern committee was trying to tell us.

Nestle also cautions against taking the diet out of the context of the lifestyle. The Mediterranean diet is widely believed to be one of the most healthful ways to eat, yet much of what we know about it is based on studies of people living on the island of Crete in the 1950s, who in many respects lived lives very different from our own. Yes, they ate lots of olive oil and little meat. But they also did more physical labor. They fasted regularly. They ate a lot of wild greens — weeds. And, perhaps most important, they consumed far fewer total calories than we do. Similarly, much of what we know about the health benefits of a vegetarian diet is based on studies of Seventh Day Adventists, who muddy the nutritional picture by drinking absolutely no alcohol and never smoking. These extraneous but unavoidable factors are called, aptly, "confounders." One last example: People who take supplements are healthier than the population at large, but their health probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the supplements they take — which recent studies have suggested are worthless. Supplement-takers are better-educated, more-affluent people who, almost by definition, take a greater-than-normal interest in personal health — confounding factors that probably account for their superior health.

But if confounding factors of lifestyle bedevil comparative studies of different populations, the supposedly more rigorous "prospective" studies of large American populations suffer from their own arguably even more disabling flaws. In these studies — of which the Women's Health Initiative is the best known — a large population is divided into two groups. The intervention group changes its diet in some prescribed manner, while the control group does not. The two groups are then tracked over many years to learn whether the intervention affects relative rates of chronic disease.

When it comes to studying nutrition, this sort of extensive, long-term clinical trial is supposed to be the gold standard. It certainly sounds sound. In the case of the Women's Health Initiative, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the eating habits and health outcomes of nearly 49,000 women (ages 50 to 79 at the beginning of the study) were tracked for eight years. One group of the women were told to reduce their consumption of fat to 20 percent of total calories. The results were announced early last year, producing front-page headlines of which the one in this newspaper was typical: "Low-Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds." And the cloud of nutritional confusion over the country darkened.

But even a cursory analysis of the study's methods makes you wonder why anyone would take such a finding seriously, let alone order a Quarter Pounder With Cheese to celebrate it, as many newspaper readers no doubt promptly went out and did. Even the beginner student of nutritionism will immediately spot several flaws: the focus was on "fat," rather than on any particular food, like meat or dairy. So women could comply simply by switching to lower-fat animal products. Also, no distinctions were made between types of fat: women getting their allowable portion of fat from olive oil or fish were lumped together with woman getting their fat from low-fat cheese or chicken breasts or margarine. Why? Because when the study was designed 16 years ago, the whole notion of "good fats" was not yet on the scientific scope. Scientists study what scientists can see.

But perhaps the biggest flaw in this study, and other studies like it, is that we have no idea what these women were really eating because, like most people when asked about their diet, they lied about it. How do we know this? Deduction. Consider: When the study began, the average participant weighed in at 170 pounds and claimed to be eating 1,800 calories a day. It would take an unusual metabolism to maintain that weight on so little food. And it would take an even freakier metabolism to drop only one or two pounds after getting down to a diet of 1,400 to 1,500 calories a day — as the women on the "low-fat" regimen claimed to have done. Sorry, ladies, but I just don't buy it.

In fact, nobody buys it. Even the scientists who conduct this sort of research conduct it in the knowledge that people lie about their food intake all the time. They even have scientific figures for the magnitude of the lie. Dietary trials like the Women's Health Initiative rely on "food-frequency questionnaires," and studies suggest that people on average eat between a fifth and a third more than they claim to on the questionnaires. How do the researchers know that? By comparing what people report on questionnaires with interviews about their dietary intake over the previous 24 hours, thought to be somewhat more reliable. In fact, the magnitude of the lie could be much greater, judging by the huge disparity between the total number of food calories produced every day for each American (3,900 calories) and the average number of those calories Americans own up to chomping: 2,000. (Waste accounts for some of the disparity, but nowhere near all of it.) All we really know about how much people actually eat is that the real number lies somewhere between those two figures.

To try to fill out the food-frequency questionnaire used by the Women's Health Initiative, as I recently did, is to realize just how shaky the data on which such trials rely really are. The survey, which took about 45 minutes to complete, started off with some relatively easy questions: "Did you eat chicken or turkey during the last three months?" Having answered yes, I was then asked, "When you ate chicken or turkey, how often did you eat the skin?" But the survey soon became harder, as when it asked me to think back over the past three months to recall whether when I ate okra, squash or yams, they were fried, and if so, were they fried in stick margarine, tub margarine, butter, "shortening" (in which category they inexplicably lump together hydrogenated vegetable oil and lard), olive or canola oil or nonstick spray? I honestly didn't remember, and in the case of any okra eaten in a restaurant, even a hypnotist could not get out of me what sort of fat it was fried in. In the meat section, the portion sizes specified haven't been seen in America since the Hoover administration. If a four-ounce portion of steak is considered "medium," was I really going to admit that the steak I enjoyed on an unrecallable number of occasions during the past three months was probably the equivalent of two or three (or, in the case of a steakhouse steak, no less than four) of these portions? I think not. In fact, most of the "medium serving sizes" to which I was asked to compare my own consumption made me feel piggish enough to want to shave a few ounces here, a few there. (I mean, I wasn't under oath or anything, was I?)

This is the sort of data on which the largest questions of diet and health are being decided in America today.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

In the end, the biggest, most ambitious and widely reported studies of diet and health leave more or less undisturbed the main features of the Western diet: lots of meat and processed foods, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything — except fruits, vegetables and whole grains. In keeping with the nutritionism paradigm and the limits of reductionist science, the researchers fiddle with single nutrients as best they can, but the populations they recruit and study are typical American eaters doing what typical American eaters do: trying to eat a little less of this nutrient, a little more of that, depending on the latest thinking. (One problem with the control groups in these studies is that they too are exposed to nutritional fads in the culture, so over time their eating habits come to more closely resemble the habits of the intervention group.) It should not surprise us that the findings of such research would be so equivocal and confusing.

But what about the elephant in the room — the Western diet? It might be useful, in the midst of our deepening confusion about nutrition, to review what we do know about diet and health. What we know is that people who eat the way we do in America today suffer much higher rates of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity than people eating more traditional diets. (Four of the 10 leading killers in America are linked to diet.) Further, we know that simply by moving to America, people from nations with low rates of these "diseases of affluence" will quickly acquire them. Nutritionism by and large takes the Western diet as a given, seeking to moderate its most deleterious effects by isolating the bad nutrients in it — things like fat, sugar, salt — and encouraging the public and the food industry to limit them. But after several decades of nutrient-based health advice, rates of cancer and heart disease in the U.S. have declined only slightly (mortality from heart disease is down since the '50s, but this is mainly because of improved treatment), and rates of obesity and diabetes have soared.

No one likes to admit that his or her best efforts at understanding and solving a problem have actually made the problem worse, but that's exactly what has happened in the case of nutritionism. Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health. Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. What would happen, for example, if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?

In nature, that is of course precisely what eating has always been: relationships among species in what we call food chains, or webs, that reach all the way down to the soil. Species co-evolve with the other species they eat, and very often a relationship of interdependence develops: I'll feed you if you spread around my genes. A gradual process of mutual adaptation transforms something like an apple or a squash into a nutritious and tasty food for a hungry animal. Over time and through trial and error, the plant becomes tastier (and often more conspicuous) in order to gratify the animal's needs and desires, while the animal gradually acquires whatever digestive tools (enzymes, etc.) are needed to make optimal use of the plant. Similarly, cow's milk did not start out as a nutritious food for humans; in fact, it made them sick until humans who lived around cows evolved the ability to digest lactose as adults. This development proved much to the advantage of both the milk drinkers and the cows.

"Health" is, among other things, the byproduct of being involved in these sorts of relationships in a food chain — involved in a great many of them, in the case of an omnivorous creature like us. Further, when the health of one link of the food chain is disturbed, it can affect all the creatures in it. When the soil is sick or in some way deficient, so will be the grasses that grow in that soil and the cattle that eat the grasses and the people who drink the milk. Or, as the English agronomist Sir Albert Howard put it in 1945 in "The Soil and Health" (a founding text of organic agriculture), we would do well to regard "the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject." Our personal health is inextricably bound up with the health of the entire food web.

In many cases, long familiarity between foods and their eaters leads to elaborate systems of communications up and down the food chain, so that a creature's senses come to recognize foods as suitable by taste and smell and color, and our bodies learn what to do with these foods after they pass the test of the senses, producing in anticipation the chemicals necessary to break them down. Health depends on knowing how to read these biological signals: this smells spoiled; this looks ripe; that's one good-looking cow. This is easier to do when a creature has long experience of a food, and much harder when a food has been designed expressly to deceive its senses — with artificial flavors, say, or synthetic sweeteners.

Note that these ecological relationships are between eaters and whole foods, not nutrients. Even though the foods in question eventually get broken down in our bodies into simple nutrients, as corn is reduced to simple sugars, the qualities of the whole food are not unimportant — they govern such things as the speed at which the sugars will be released and absorbed, which we're coming to see as critical to insulin metabolism. Put another way, our bodies have a longstanding and sustainable relationship to corn that we do not have to high-fructose corn syrup. Such a relationship with corn syrup might develop someday (as people evolve superhuman insulin systems to cope with regular floods of fructose and glucose), but for now the relationship leads to ill health because our bodies don't know how to handle these biological novelties. In much the same way, human bodies that can cope with chewing coca leaves — a longstanding relationship between native people and the coca plant in South America — cannot cope with cocaine or crack, even though the same "active ingredients" are present in all three. Reductionism as a way of understanding food or drugs may be harmless, even necessary, but reductionism in practice can lead to problems.

Looking at eating through this ecological lens opens a whole new perspective on exactly what the Western diet is: a radical and rapid change not just in our foodstuffs over the course of the 20th century but also in our food relationships, all the way from the soil to the meal. The ideology of nutritionism is itself part of that change. To get a firmer grip on the nature of those changes is to begin to know how we might make our relationships to food healthier. These changes have been numerous and far-reaching, but consider as a start these four large-scale ones:

From Whole Foods to Refined. The case of corn points up one of the key features of the modern diet: a shift toward increasingly refined foods, especially carbohydrates. Call it applied reductionism. Humans have been refining grains since at least the Industrial Revolution, favoring white flour (and white rice) even at the price of lost nutrients. Refining grains extends their shelf life (precisely because it renders them less nutritious to pests) and makes them easier to digest, by removing the fiber that ordinarily slows the release of their sugars. Much industrial food production involves an extension and intensification of this practice, as food processors find ways to deliver glucose — the brain's preferred fuel — ever more swiftly and efficiently. Sometimes this is precisely the point, as when corn is refined into corn syrup; other times it is an unfortunate byproduct of food processing, as when freezing food destroys the fiber that would slow sugar absorption.

So fast food is fast in this other sense too: it is to a considerable extent predigested, in effect, and therefore more readily absorbed by the body. But while the widespread acceleration of the Western diet offers us the instant gratification of sugar, in many people (and especially those newly exposed to it) the "speediness" of this food overwhelms the insulin response and leads to Type II diabetes. As one nutrition expert put it to me, we're in the middle of "a national experiment in mainlining glucose." To encounter such a diet for the first time, as when people accustomed to a more traditional diet come to America, or when fast food comes to their countries, delivers a shock to the system. Public-health experts call it "the nutrition transition," and it can be deadly.

From Complexity to Simplicity. If there is one word that covers nearly all the changes industrialization has made to the food chain, it would be simplification. Chemical fertilizers simplify the chemistry of the soil, which in turn appears to simplify the chemistry of the food grown in that soil. Since the widespread adoption of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in the 1950s, the nutritional quality of produce in America has, according to U.S.D.A. figures, declined significantly. Some researchers blame the quality of the soil for the decline; others cite the tendency of modern plant breeding to select for industrial qualities like yield rather than nutritional quality. Whichever it is, the trend toward simplification of our food continues on up the chain. Processing foods depletes them of many nutrients, a few of which are then added back in through "fortification": folic acid in refined flour, vitamins and minerals in breakfast cereal. But food scientists can add back only the nutrients food scientists recognize as important. What are they overlooking?

Simplification has occurred at the level of species diversity, too. The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant species, corn and soybeans chief among them. Today, a mere four crops account for two-thirds of the calories humans eat. When you consider that humankind has historically consumed some 80,000 edible species, and that 3,000 of these have been in widespread use, this represents a radical simplification of the food web. Why should this matter? Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between 50 and 100 different chemical compounds and elements to be healthy. It's hard to believe that we can get everything we need from a diet consisting largely of processed corn, soybeans, wheat and rice.

From Leaves to Seeds. It's no coincidence that most of the plants we have come to rely on are grains; these crops are exceptionally efficient at transforming sunlight into macronutrients — carbs, fats and proteins. These macronutrients in turn can be profitably transformed into animal protein (by feeding them to animals) and processed foods of every description. Also, the fact that grains are durable seeds that can be stored for long periods means they can function as commodities as well as food, making these plants particularly well suited to the needs of industrial capitalism.

The needs of the human eater are another matter. An oversupply of macronutrients, as we now have, itself represents a serious threat to our health, as evidenced by soaring rates of obesity and diabetes. But the undersupply of micronutrients may constitute a threat just as serious. Put in the simplest terms, we're eating a lot more seeds and a lot fewer leaves, a tectonic dietary shift the full implications of which we are just beginning to glimpse. If I may borrow the nutritionist's reductionist vocabulary for a moment, there are a host of critical micronutrients that are harder to get from a diet of refined seeds than from a diet of leaves. There are the antioxidants and all the other newly discovered phytochemicals (remember that sprig of thyme?); there is the fiber, and then there are the healthy omega-3 fats found in leafy green plants, which may turn out to be most important benefit of all.

Most people associate omega-3 fatty acids with fish, but fish get them from green plants (specifically algae), which is where they all originate. Plant leaves produce these essential fatty acids ("essential" because our bodies can't produce them on their own) as part of photosynthesis. Seeds contain more of another essential fatty acid: omega-6. Without delving too deeply into the biochemistry, the two fats perform very different functions, in the plant as well as the plant eater. Omega-3s appear to play an important role in neurological development and processing, the permeability of cell walls, the metabolism of glucose and the calming of inflammation. Omega-6s are involved in fat storage (which is what they do for the plant), the rigidity of cell walls, clotting and the inflammation response. (Think of omega-3s as fleet and flexible, omega-6s as sturdy and slow.) Since the two lipids compete with each other for the attention of important enzymes, the ratio between omega-3s and omega-6s may matter more than the absolute quantity of either fat. Thus too much omega-6 may be just as much a problem as too little omega-3.

And that might well be a problem for people eating a Western diet. As we've shifted from leaves to seeds, the ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s in our bodies has shifted, too. At the same time, modern food-production practices have further diminished the omega-3s in our diet. Omega-3s, being less stable than omega-6s, spoil more readily, so we have selected for plants that produce fewer of them; further, when we partly hydrogenate oils to render them more stable, omega-3s are eliminated. Industrial meat, raised on seeds rather than leaves, has fewer omega-3s and more omega-6s than preindustrial meat used to have. And official dietary advice since the 1970s has promoted the consumption of polyunsaturated vegetable oils, most of which are high in omega-6s (corn and soy, especially). Thus, without realizing what we were doing, we significantly altered the ratio of these two essential fats in our diets and bodies, with the result that the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in the typical American today stands at more than 10 to 1; before the widespread introduction of seed oils at the turn of the last century, it was closer to 1 to 1.

The role of these lipids is not completely understood, but many researchers say that these historically low levels of omega-3 (or, conversely, high levels of omega-6) bear responsibility for many of the chronic diseases associated with the Western diet, especially heart disease and diabetes. (Some researchers implicate omega-3 deficiency in rising rates of depression and learning disabilities as well.) To remedy this deficiency, nutritionism classically argues for taking omega-3 supplements or fortifying food products, but because of the complex, competitive relationship between omega-3 and omega-6, adding more omega-3s to the diet may not do much good unless you also reduce your intake of omega-6.

From Food Culture to Food Science. The last important change wrought by the Western diet is not, strictly speaking, ecological. But the industrialization of our food that we call the Western diet is systematically destroying traditional food cultures. Before the modern food era — and before nutritionism — people relied for guidance about what to eat on their national or ethnic or regional cultures. We think of culture as a set of beliefs and practices to help mediate our relationship to other people, but of course culture (at least before the rise of science) has also played a critical role in helping mediate people's relationship to nature. Eating being a big part of that relationship, cultures have had a great deal to say about what and how and why and when and how much we should eat. Of course when it comes to food, culture is really just a fancy word for Mom, the figure who typically passes on the food ways of the group — food ways that, although they were never "designed" to optimize health (we have many reasons to eat the way we do), would not have endured if they did not keep eaters alive and well.

The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and marketing to help us decide questions about what to eat. Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used by the industry to sell more food and to undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating. You would not have read this far into this article if your food culture were intact and healthy; you would simply eat the way your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents taught you to eat. The question is, Are we better off with these new authorities than we were with the traditional authorities they supplanted? The answer by now should be clear.

It might be argued that, at this point in history, we should simply accept that fast food is our food culture. Over time, people will get used to eating this way and our health will improve. But for natural selection to help populations adapt to the Western diet, we'd have to be prepared to let those whom it sickens die. That's not what we're doing. Rather, we're turning to the health-care industry to help us "adapt." Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick. It's gotten good at extending the lives of people with heart disease, and now it's working on obesity and diabetes. Capitalism is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into lucrative business opportunities: diet pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery. But while fast food may be good business for the health-care industry, surely the cost to society — estimated at more than $200 billion a year in diet-related health-care costs — is unsustainable.

BEYOND NUTRITIONISM

To medicalize the diet problem is of course perfectly consistent with nutritionism. So what might a more ecological or cultural approach to the problem recommend? How might we plot our escape from nutritionism and, in turn, from the deleterious effects of the modern diet? In theory nothing could be simpler — stop thinking and eating that way — but this is somewhat harder to do in practice, given the food environment we now inhabit and the loss of sharp cultural tools to guide us through it. Still, I do think escape is possible, to which end I can now revisit — and elaborate on, but just a little — the simple principles of healthy eating I proposed at the beginning of this essay, several thousand words ago. So try these few (flagrantly unscientific) rules of thumb, collected in the course of my nutritional odyssey, and see if they don't at least point us in the right direction.

1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn't recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They're apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don't forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg's can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don't take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won't find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer's market; you also won't find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.

5. Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There's no escaping the fact that better food — measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) — costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good soils — whether certified organic or not — will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is grown.

"Eat less" is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. "Calorie restriction" has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention. Food abundance is a problem, but culture has helped here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation. Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practiced a principle they called "Hara Hachi Bu": eat until you are 80 percent full. To make the "eat less" message a bit more palatable, consider that quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don't know about you, but the better the quality of the food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on what's so good about plants — the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? — but they do agree that they're probably really good for you and certainly can't hurt. Also, by eating a plant-based diet, you'll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less "energy dense" than the other things you might eat. Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians ("flexitarians") are as healthy as vegetarians. Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he advised treating meat more as a flavoring than a food.

7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren't a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn't still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals — and the serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can't possibly be good for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.

8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that food is fuel and not communion. The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal or journalism. Plus, the food you grow yourself contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it. So you might want to think about putting down this article now and picking up a spatula or hoe.

9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of course is an argument from nutritionism, but there is a better one, one that takes a broader view of "health." Biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields. What does that have to do with your health? Everything. The vast monocultures that now feed us require tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep from collapsing. Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier people. It's all connected, which is another way of saying that your health isn't bordered by your body and that what's good for the soil is probably good for you, too.

ROME, Jan. 25 — As a boy, in October 1943, Pacifico Disegni watched from his window as two German trucks hauled people from the ghetto in Rome, a city where Jews have lived for 2,000 years.

Last year, in blessedly more peaceful times, a rich visitor from Boston took in the view from that same window. A magnificent front-row view of the Theater of Marcellus, first planned by Julius Caesar, somehow salves the sting of history.

Mr. Disegni, now 78, said the man produced a blank check and offered to buy the apartment on the spot.

"He said, 'You write how many millions you want,' " Mr. Disegni said.

Mr. Disegni, who is Jewish, refused. But these bookend events at his window cast light on a paradox in the city with the oldest Jewish population in Europe. High real estate prices, not violence or bias, are driving the last Jews from their homes in the old ghetto, which is slowly transforming itself into a trendy enclave for the rich and famous.

Experts say only 200 or 300 Jews remain, in a neighborhood that numbered perhaps 9,000 after the deportation of 2,000 or more during World War II.

But there is a second paradox. Even as the number of Jews living in the ghetto drops to near nothing, Jewish life is thriving.

Rome's Jewish school recently moved to the ghetto from a neighboring area. Jewish shops, including the first kosher fast-food restaurants, are popular. Visits to the museum at the grand synagogue have doubled in two years.

"Even if Jews no longer live in the area, they come to open their shops," said Daniela Di Castro, director of the Jewish Museum of Rome. "So there is always Jewish life around, to work, to go to the synagogue, to buy from the kosher market, bring their children to school.

"You always have a reason to come here if you are Jew."

It is a dynamic of complex layers, defying media alarmism about the loss of Jewish character in central Rome, but not quite assuring that character's ultimate survival.

On the other hand, this is Italy, where history moves at its own unpredictable pace. For now, few locals can imagine the ghetto as having a soul that is anything other than Jewish.

"It would be impossible to erase it," said Luciano Calò, 45, a Jew who owns Bartaruga, a bar next to one of Rome's most sublime fountains, featuring four boys playing with turtles, a whimsy Bernini added 83 years after the fountain was finished.

"History was born here," Mr. Calò added. "And the tourists come here because of that history in the walls of these buildings. You feel the desperation of the people who lived here."

Jews are documented in Rome as early as the second century B.C., first as respected guests from the empire's far reaches, later as slaves who helped build the Colosseum, finished in A.D. 80.

In 1516 the Jews of Venice were the first in Europe to be segregated — and there the word "ghetto" was born, from the local dialect for the slag heaps in the area where Jews were forced to live.

In 1555 a papal bull established a ghetto in Rome, laid out near the Tiber, amid the nubby, desiccated ruins, and locked at night. That entity was not abolished until Italy's unification in 1870, but Jews continued to live there, often in deep poverty, in buildings with inadequate heat and plumbing.

Those conditions drove many Jews to leave the ghetto after World War II, settling in more modern apartments in Monteverde or near Viale Marconi, to the south. Many moved to Israel.

As the years went on, the rich began buying up homes all around central Rome, including in the ghetto. Prices and quality went up — and then up much more when Italy converted to the euro in 2002.

A real estate operator, Daniela Di Maulo, said apartments in the ghetto now cost as much as $1,000 a square foot.

"It's only for tourists, for people on the magazine covers," she said.

Speculation exploded, and the choicest properties were often those of the district's remaining Jews, many of them elderly. One is Roberto Calò, 75, who said he had fended off at least 10 offers for millions of euros.

"I would never accept," said Mr. Calò, the uncle of the bar owner. "It's because I have old memories," among them of his father and brother, who were taken away by the Nazis in October 1943 (and who were among the few who returned). But many did sell. With prices so high, few are casting blame.

"It could be that there is an offer you can't say no to," said Angelo Sermoneta, 58, who was born in the ghetto. "There is an even greater god, and that is the god of money."

But money is not the only force in the ghetto. Mr. Calò and Mr. Sermoneta were sitting in a cozy social club in the heart of the ghetto, along with 11 older friends who were all born there. Only four of them still lived there.

But they all go to the club regularly — to chat (about sports, and about politics in Italy and Israel) and to drink — basically to keep the ghetto alive and Jewish. So, too, Jews who live around Rome worship in the ghetto, socialize there, work there, because commercial space is not as pricey as apartments.

"For us Jews to come here every night — it's something that's in our DNA," Mr. Sermoneta said. "It's where we were born, where we lived, where our friends are."

Street life has become even more Jewish, with shops and restaurants with Jewish products and food that attract tourists, many of them American Jews, and that keep Rome's Jews anchored there. Seven years ago, Rafael Fadlon, now 36, opened the ghetto's first modern kosher restaurant, La Taverna del Ghetto, and last year, he started its first kosher fast-food restaurant — both of which, he reports, are doing well.

"If you want to keep kosher, it's simpler now than 10 years ago," he said.

"If you are talking about Jews living here, it's not so much," he added. "But it's much better equipped than other ghettos around the world."

With prices as they are, he cannot see Jews coming back to live in the ghetto.

"Jews are not stupid," he said. "They would like to move here, but they can't."

ROME, Jan. 31 — "Dear Editor," began a letter published Wednesday on the front page of La Repubblica, the newspaper that Silvio Berlusconi hates most. The scalding letter demanded an apology from Mr. Berlusconi for flirting publicly — and it was signed by his wife.

And so, a nation bored and a little down at its return to semi-normal politics woke to a juicy news cycle with an inescapable conclusion: in or out of power, Mr. Berlusconi may behave reprehensibly, but Italy cannot keep its eyes off him.

"We have had for eight months a notably boring government," said Giuliano Ferrara, an editor and informal aide to Mr. Berlusconi, referring to the stewardship of Prime Minister Romano Prodi, who beat Mr. Berlusconi in elections last spring.

"And right now there is an explosion of strange and weird vitality, the heart that keeps on pumping," he said. "People miss very much that style. It's not healthy, but it's Italian."

It turns out that the 70-year-old former prime minister, whose own heart now beats with a pacemaker, attended an awards ceremony last week and was overly friendly with two young and beautiful guests.

"If I weren't already married, I would marry you right now," he told one, according to Italian news media accounts. To another, he said, "With you I would go anywhere."

"These are statements I consider damaging to my dignity," wrote Veronica Lario, 50, who has been with Mr. Berlusconi for 27 years. His remarks could not be "reduced to jokes," she said.

"To my husband and to the public man, I therefore ask for a public apology, not having received one privately."

In divining what this could mean, Italians barely knew where to start.

Feminists called it an overdue rallying cry for Italian women like Ms. Lario, who has endured years of supposed infidelity (and no end of sexual remarks, like when Mr. Berlusconi opened a political conference by praising the legs of the women in the front row). Political analysts said Mr. Berlusconi, who wants a third turn as prime minister, could never again win the votes of women — and so was finished.

Then, in early evening, Mr. Berlusconi, who can never be counted out, wrote his own open letter, released by Forza Italia, his political party.

"Your dignity should not be an issue: I will guard it like a precious material in my heart even when thoughtless jokes come out of my mouth," he wrote. "But marriage proposals, no, believe me, I have never made one to anyone.

"Forgive me, however, I beg of you, and take this public testimony of private pride that submits to your anger as an act of love. One among many. A huge kiss. Silvio."

In the end, it seemed an especially spicy episode in the long and complicated relationship not only between Silvio and Veronica, but also between Silvio and Italy. The private drama of Italy's richest man, the nation's shrewd, shady and irrepressible personification, became something public, possibly even relevant politically and psychically.

There seemed little question here that Ms. Lario's letter deserved its spot on the front page. "It would be like Hillary Clinton asks for the public apology from Bill Clinton," said Ezio Mauro, La Repubblica's top editor.

Indeed, Italy's top three evening talk shows devoted all their time to the unusual exchange of letters. Beppe Severgnini, one of the most discerning commentators on Italian mores, quickly churned out a column for Corriere della Sera summing up its import.

"The man is a walking oxymoron, but it has not stopped him from working his way up," he wrote. "Why? Simple: because he embodies the Italian dream of being everything, of pleasing everyone (and indulging himself in everything), without giving up anything."

Perhaps all marriages are mysteries on some level, but the drama also shed light on one of Italy's most visible but ambiguous couples. They met in 1980, when he was a budding, and married, builder and she was a beautiful B-movie actress appearing in a play in Milan. He saw her on stage, the story goes, and fell deeply in love.

He left his first wife, they married and had three children (he already had two). He grew richer, entered politics in the mid-1990s, and the two seemed somehow together yet increasingly apart. No small amount of his public persona was linked to his constant, earthy joking about women and his mastery of them, amid rumors that monogamy was not among his virtues.

"I lost my hair because I had too many girlfriends," he once said (he has since had implants). In 2003, he gave a reason foreigners should invest in Italy: "Aside from the good weather, we have beautiful businesswomen and also beautiful secretaries."

Through it all, Ms. Lario remained largely silent — a fact she noted acidly in the letter, which she pointedly signed "Mrs. Berlusconi" though she routinely uses her own name. "I chose not to leave space for marital conflicts, even when his behavior created reasons to do so," she wrote.

But not entirely: she made no secret over the years that her personal political views were more to the left than her husband's. Maria Latella, an Italian journalist who wrote a biography of Ms. Lario, recalled that during Mr. Berlusconi's first term as prime minister, in 1994, a newspaper article appeared saying that every day he sent flowers to someone.

He contended they were to his wife. But Ms. Latella noted that Ms. Lario had sent the newspaper a brief letter saying that, in fact, she never received flowers from Palazzo Chigi, the prime minister's official residence.

"She considered it humiliating that flowers sent to another person were attributed to her," Ms. Latella said. "It shows the character of the person."

Ms. Lario also spoke candidly in the biography, saying that she rarely saw Mr. Berlusconi but that she considered their marriage stable and herself "the perfect kind of wife for the kind of man Silvio is."

"He can concentrate on himself and his work knowing his wife won't create a fuss if he's away from his family," she said in the biography.

As fate would have it, on the very same day that Ms. Lario fired off her letter, Mr. Berlusconi echoed his wife's comments, now possibly void, in an interview he gave, also to Ms. Latella, for her magazine, A.

"Veronica has always been a total passion," he said. "When we met I lost my head for her. And she has been a marvelous mother.

"She has never made me look bad, never — while the wives of certain other politicians...," he said, trailing off his thought. "And then she is so indulgent. What more could I want?"

Ms. Latella said, "I think he was wrong this time."

Bernie Friedkin, a native of Brownsville, Brooklyn, who was known as Schoolboy and who as a professional boxer in the late 1930s and early '40s battled many of his opponents to a draw — including three former lightweight champions — died Jan. 18 in Brooklyn. He was 89.

He died of natural causes at a hospice, his granddaughter Sabrina Saltz said.

Given the nickname Schoolboy because of his baby face and 5-foot-3 height, and because he used his older brother's birth certificate to be admitted to local gyms when he was 14, Friedkin developed into a skilled tactical fighter, rather than a hard puncher, in a six-year professional career that began in 1935. He started as a featherweight, at less than 126 pounds, but bulked up to 135 as a lightweight.

According to records at the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, N.Y., Friedkin won 48 fights, 9 by knockout, with 11 losses and 16 draws.

"He has more draws than losses," the boxing historian Bert Sugar said. "Sixteen draws is almost an unheard-of number."

In March 1937, Friedkin fought the former lightweight champion Eligio Sardiñas, known as Kid Chocolate, to a draw. In January 1940, he faced Mike Belloise, another former lightweight champion, twice, with both bouts ending in draws. Five months later, he stepped into the ring with a third former lightweight champion, Petey Scalzo; another draw.

"That tells me he might have won some of these fights," Sugar said, "but they were protecting the bigger names."

In November 1940, five months after their draw, Friedkin and Scalzo faced each other again. This time, Scalzo won an eight-round decision.

Bernard Friedkin was born on July 10, 1917, one of seven children of Morris and Bessie Friedkin. Besides his granddaughter Sabrina Saltz of Brooklyn, he is survived by his wife of 60 years, the former Lenore Bennett; two daughters, Donna Saltz and Marilyn Saewitz, both of Staten Island; and two other grandchildren.

On July 21, 1938, a bitter rivalry between Friedkin and Al Davis, known as Bummy, brought 6,000 fans to Madison Square Garden. Friedkin was knocked out in the fourth round.

"This was a turf war," Sugar said, "two Jewish boxers from Brownsville."

Early in the documentary "An Unreasonable Man," it is noted that Ralph Nader is more likely to be remembered for his 2000 presidential campaign than for the decades of advocacy that preceded it. And the movie, an admiring but hardly uncritical portrait of Mr. Nader, confirms this suspicion by devoting nearly half of its more than two-hour running time to the 2000 election and its aftermath.

That event seems at once irrelevant and urgent, lost in the mists of pre-9/11 history and painfully topical. Certainly the passage of time has not cooled tempers or settled arguments. And so, much of the second half of "An Unreasonable Man," directed by Steve Skrovan and Henriette Mantel (a former associate of Mr. Nader, she is also interviewed on camera), consists of talking heads talking past one another.

To liberal media critics like Eric Alterman and Todd Gitlin, Mr. Nader is "self-deluded," "intellectually dishonest," a "megalomaniac" and worse. His moral vanity, in their view (which is hardly theirs alone), cost Al Gore a decisive margin of victory over George W. Bush. Spoiling it for the Democrats, Mr. Nader's detractors (among them some former allies) contend, was his intention all along.

This charge is disputed by members of his campaign staff, who also repeat his central claim that the Republicans and the Democrats are basically a two-headed corporate oligarchy, rather than genuinely distinct political forces.

The argument goes in circles, and while it makes for interesting, vexing viewing, it also throws the film somewhat off balance. The family quarrel on the American left that Mr. Nader's candidacy continues to provoke threatens to overshadow the larger debates that his earlier career as a consumer advocate placed at the center of American civic life. These have to do with the power of corporations, the regulatory authority of government and the limits of the free market — issues that have hardly faded away, and that aren't readily summed up in "Did so!"/"Did not!" back-and-forthing.

In promotional materials, "An Unreasonable Man" has the ungainly tagline "Ralph Nader: How Do You Define a Legacy?" — a question that Mr. Nader insists does not concern him in the least. While giving him and his supporters ample time to justify his run for the presidency, the filmmakers also seek to balance the historical ledger. Alongside those 97,000 contentious Florida votes, they suggest, must be reckoned the hundreds of thousands of lives saved by improvements in automobile safety, environmental protections and safeguards on consumer products, causes Mr. Nader and his colleagues championed for years.

His impact on these areas of modern life is the focus of the movie's riveting first hour, which is as much the biography of a movement as the story of a single man. Not that there is much of a distinction: from the mid-1960s on, Mr. Nader's cause was his life. His exposé of the "designed-in" dangers of the Chevrolet Corvair, published first in The New Republic (in articles written by James Ridgeway) and later in "Unsafe at Any Speed" were followed by Congressional hearings that brought both fame and influence. Money from a settlement with General Motors — which had hired private detectives to snoop around Mr. Nader's personal life, something even his close associates doubt exists — became the seed for future advocacy and activism.

Mr. Nader attracted a cadre of young idealists whose approach to politics was both a product of the times and a departure from it. The point, as they saw it, was not to overthrow the system, but rather to bring it into line with its stated principles, a goal that was rational rather than romantic and pursued by means of research and reporting rather than demonstrations or direct actions.

For a while, especially during the Carter administration, Mr. Nader's commitment to using the legal system and the apparatus of government to check the influence of corporations brought him into alliance with the Democratic Party. His subsequent entry into electoral politics is presented in the movie, persuasively enough, as a result of the fraying of this concord. Some degree of disappointment was probably inevitable. For better or for worse, the engine of democracy is compromise, and Mr. Nader is uncompromising to the very core of his being.

And "An Unreasonable Man," a conventional collage of archival clips and retrospective interviews, works hard to do him justice. Its ideological leanings are evident and unsurprising, but more screen time for Mr. Nader's pre-2000 (or pre-post-2000) adversaries would have made a richer film. As it is, the filmmakers and their interlocutors make much of Mr. Nader's popularity with the American public in the 1970s, but seem unable to acknowledge that, in the next decade, much of that same public embraced Ronald Reagan, whose ascendancy is treated, with wearying predictability, as the result of elite conspiracy and public delusion.

The standoff over the 2000 presidential election is handled with a better feel for unresolved tensions and contradictions. To these must be added a curious and telling footnote. "An Unreasonable Man" was shown at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, alongside another documentary featuring Mr. Gore, Davis Guggenheim's "Inconvenient Truth." That movie, now contending for an Academy Award, is almost entirely about the challenges of the future. This one, for all its invocations of the progressive spirit, concerns itself mainly with the battles of the past.

The American Jewish Committee, an ardent defender of Israel, is known for speaking out against anti-Semitism, but this conservative advocacy group has recently stirred up a bitter and emotional debate with a new target: liberal Jews.

An essay the committee features on its Web site, ajc.org, titled " 'Progressive' Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism," says a number of Jews, through their speaking and writing, are feeding a rise in virulent anti-Semitism by questioning whether Israel should even exist.

In an introduction to the essay, David A. Harris, the executive director of the committee, writes, "Perhaps the most surprising — and distressing — feature of this new trend is the very public participation of some Jews in the verbal onslaught against Zionism and the Jewish State." Those who oppose Israel's basic right to exist, he continues, "whether Jew or gentile, must be confronted."

The essay comes at a time of high anxiety among many Jews, who are seeing not only a surge in attacks from familiar antagonists, but also gloves-off condemnations of Israel from onetime allies and respected figures, like former President Jimmy Carter, who titled his new book on the Mideast "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid." By spotlighting the touchy issue of whether Jews are contributing to anti-Semitism, both admirers and detractors of the essay agree that it aggravates an already heated dispute over where legitimate criticism of Israel and its defenders ends and anti-Semitic statements begin.

The essay, written by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, an English professor and the director of the Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts at Indiana University in Bloomington, castigates a number of people by name, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, the historian Tony Judt, the poet Adrienne Rich and the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, in addition to a number of academics.

Mr. Judt, whose views on Israel and the American Jewish lobby have frequently drawn fire, is chastised for what Mr. Rosenfeld calls "a series of increasingly bitter articles" that have "called Israel everything from arrogant, aggressive, anachronistic, and infantile to dysfunctional, immoral, and a primary cause of present-day anti-Semitism."

A historian at New York University, Mr. Judt said in a telephone interview that he believed the real purpose of outspoken denunciations of him and others was to stifle harsh criticism of Israel. "The link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is newly created," he said, adding that he fears "the two will have become so conflated in the minds of the world" that references to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust will come to be seen as "just a political defense of Israeli policy."

The essay also takes to task "Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" (Grove Press), a 2003 collection of essays edited by Mr. Kushner and Alisa Solomon. Mr. Kushner said that he and Ms. Solomon took great care to include a wide range of voices in their collection, including those of Ms. Rich, the playwright Arthur Miller and various rabbis.

"Most Jews like me find this a very painful subject," Mr. Kushner said, and are aware of the rise in vicious anti-Semitism around the world but feel "it's morally incumbent upon us to articulate questions and reservations."

Over the telephone, the dinner table and the Internet, people who follow Jewish issues have been buzzing over Mr. Rosenfeld's article. Alan Wolfe, a political scientist and the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, said, "I'm almost in a state of shock" at the verbal assaults directed at liberal Jews.

On H-Antisemitism (h-net.org), an Internet forum for scholarly discussions of the subject, Michael Posluns, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, wrote, "Sad and misbegotten missives of the sort below make me wonder if it is not the purpose of mainstream Jewish organizations to foster anti-Jewishness by calling down all who take from their Jewish experience and Jewish thought a different ethos and different ways of being as feeding anti-Semitism."

Others have praised Mr. Rosenfeld's indictment and joined the fray. Shulamit Reinharz, a sociologist who is also the wife of Jehuda Reinharz, the president of Brandeis University, wrote in a column for The Jewish Advocate in Boston: "Most would say that they are simply anti-Zionists, not anti-Semites. But I disagree, because in a world where there is only one Jewish state, to oppose it vehemently is to endanger Jews."

Although many of the responses to the essay have referred to its subject as "Jewish anti-Semitism," Mr. Rosenfeld said in a telephone interview that he was very careful not to use that phrase. But whatever it is called, he said, "I wanted to show that in an age when anti-Semitism is resurgent, Jews thinking the way they're thinking is feeding into a very nasty cause."

In his essay he says that "one of the most distressing features of the new anti-Semitism" is "the participation of Jews alongside it." Like others, Mr. Cohen of The Washington Post complained that the essay cherry-picked quotations. "He mischaracterized what I wrote," he said. "I've been critical of Israel at times, but I've always been a defender of Israel." He did add, however, that a wide range of writers were named, some of whom have written inflammatory words about Israel. "He has me in a very strange neighborhood," Mr. Cohen said.

The dispute goes beyond the familiar family squabbling among Jews that is characterized by the old joke about two Jews having three opinions on a single subject. Bitter debates over anti-Israel statements and anti-Semitism have entangled government officials, academics, opinion-makers and others over the past year, particularly since fervent supporters and tough critics of Israel can be found on the right and the left.

Mr. Wolfe, who has written about a recent rise in what he calls "Jewish illiberalism," traces the heated language to increasing opposition to the Iraq war and President Bush's policy in the Middle East, which he said had spurred liberal Jews to become more outspoken about Israel.

"Events in the world have sharpened a sense of what's at stake," he said. "Israel is more isolated than ever," causing American Jewish defenders of Israel to become more aggressive.

On this point Mr. Rosenfeld and Mr. Wolfe are in agreement. "It's going up a notch or four or five," Mr. Rosenfeld said in an interview. "One of the things that is clear," he said of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel attacks, "is that what used to be on the margin and not very serious is becoming more and more mainstream."

Mr. Rosenfeld, who has written and edited more than half a dozen books as well as other publications for the committee, emphasized that policy disagreements were natural and expected. Opposing Israel's settlement of the West Bank or treatment of Palestinians "is, in itself, not anti-Semitic," he writes; it is questioning Israel's right to exist that crosses the line.

But Mr. Judt said, "I don't know anyone in a respectable range of opinion who thinks Israel shouldn't exist." (Mr. Judt advocates a binational state that is not exclusively Jewish, something that many Jews see as equivalent to dissolving Israel). He contends that harsh complaints about Israel's treatment of Palestinians are the real target.

Last year Mr. Judt came to the defense of two prominent political scientists, Stephen M. Walt at Harvard and John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, after they were besieged for publishing a paper that baldly stated (among other things) that anyone critical of Israel or the American Jewish lobby "stands a good chance of being labeled an anti-Semite."

David Singer, the committee's director of research, said the attention Mr. Rosenfeld's essay had drawn was not unexpected. "We certainly thought that it would raise eyebrows in some quarters," he said.

"I think it's an act of courage" on the part of the American Jewish Committee and the author, he added. "It obviously deals with matters of great sensitivity."

"Well, this is quite a turnout for an 'ism,' " said the art historian and critic Lucy Lippard on Friday morning as she looked out at the people filling the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater at the Museum of Modern Art and spilling into the aisles. "Especially in a museum not notorious for its historical support of women."

Ms. Lippard, now in her 70s, was a keynote speaker for a two-day symposium organized by the museum that was titled "The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts." The event itself was an unofficial curtain-raiser for what is shaping up as a watershed year for the exhibition — and institutionalization, skeptics say — of feminist art.

For the first time in its history this art will be given full-dress museum survey treatment, and not in just one major show but in two. On March 4 "Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution" opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, followed on March 23 by "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum. (On the same day the Brooklyn Museum will officially open its new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and a permanent gallery for "The Dinner Party," Judy Chicago's seminal proto-feminist work.)

Such long-withheld recognition has been awaited with a mixture of resignation and impatient resentment. Everyone knows that our big museums are our most conservative cultural institutions. And feminism, routinely mocked by the public media for 35 years as indissolubly linked with radicalism and bad art, has been a hard sell.

But curators and critics have increasingly come to see that feminism has generated the most influential art impulses of the late 20th and early 21st century. There is almost no new work that has not in some way been shaped by it. When you look at Matthew Barney, you're basically seeing pilfered elements of feminist art, unacknowledged as such.

The MoMA symposium was sold out weeks in advance. Ms. Lippard and the art historian Linda Nochlin appeared, like tutelary deities, at the beginning and end respectively; in between came panels with about 20 speakers. The audience was made up almost entirely of women, among them many veterans of the women's art movement of the 1970s and a healthy sprinkling of younger students, artists and scholars. It was clear that people were hungry to hear about and think about feminist art, whatever that once was, is now or might be.

What it once was was relatively easy to grasp. Ms. Lippard spun out an impressionistic account of its complex history, as projected images of art by women streamed across the screen behind her, telling an amazing story of their own. She concluded by saying that the big contribution of feminist art "was to not make a contribution to Modernism." It rejected Modernism's exclusionary values and authoritarian certainties for an art of openness, ambiguity, reciprocity and what another speaker, Griselda Pollock, called "ethical hospitality," features now identified with Postmodernism.

But feminism was never as embracing and accessible as it wanted to be. Early on, some feminists had a problem with the "lavender menace" of lesbianism. The racial divide within feminism has never been resolved and still isn't, even as feminism casts itself more and more on a globalist model.

The MoMA audience was almost entirely white. Only one panelist, the young Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu, was black. And the renowned critic Geeta Kapur from Delhi had to represent, by default, all of Asia. "I feel like I'm gate-crashing a reunion," Ms. Mutu joked as she began to speak, and she wasn't wrong.

At the same time one of feminism's great strengths has been a capacity for self-criticism and self-correction. Yet atmospherically the symposium was a very MoMA event, polished, well executed, well mannered, even cozy. A good half of the talks came across as more soothing than agitating, suitable for any occasion rather than tailored to one onto which, I sensed, intense personal, political and historical hopes had been pinned.

Still, there was some agitation, and it came with the first panel, "Activism/Race/Geopolitics," in a performance by the New York artist Coco Fusco. Ms. Fusco strode to the podium in combat fatigues and, like a major instructing her troops, began lecturing on the creative ways in which women could use sex as a torture tactic on terrorist suspects, specifically on Islamic prisoners.

The performance was scarifyingly funny as a send-up of feminism's much-maligned sexual "essentialism." But its obvious references to Abu Ghraib, where women were victimizers, was telling.

In the context of a mild-mannered symposium and proposed visions of a "feminist future" that saw collegial tolerance and generosity as solutions to a harsh world, Ms. Fusco made the point that, at least in the present, women are every bit as responsible for that harshness — for what goes on in Iraq for example — as anyone.

Ms. Kapur's talk was also topical, but within the framework of India. It is often said that the activist art found in early Western feminism and now adopted by artists in India, Africa and elsewhere has lost its pertinence in its place of origin. Yet in presenting work by two Indian artists, Rummana Hussain (1952-1999) and Navjot Altaf (born in 1949), Ms. Kapur made it clear that they have at least as much to teach to the so-called West as the other way around.

Ms. Hussain, a religious secularist, used images from her Muslim background as a critical response to sectarian violence; Ms. Altaf (known as Navjot), though based in Mumbai, produces art collaboratively with tribal women who live difficult lives in rural India.

Collaborative or collective work of the kind Navjot does has grown in popularity in the United States and Europe in the past few years. And several of the symposium's panelists — Ms. Lippard, the Guerrilla Girls, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Catherine de Zegher — referred to it as a potential way for feminist art to avoid being devoured and devitalized by an omnivorous art market.

It was Ms. Fusco again who brought utopian dreams to earth. While sympathetic to the idea of collective work as an alternative to the salable lone-genius model, she suggested that the merchandising of art is at present so encompassing, and the art industry so fundamentally corrupted by it, that even collectives tend to end up adhering to a corporate model.

The power of the market, which pushes a few careers and throws the rest out — the very story of feminist art's neglect — was the invisible subtext to the entire symposium. It was barely addressed, however, nor was the reality that the canonization of feminist art by museums would probably suppress everything that had made the art radical. Certainly no solutions for either problem was advanced, except one, incidentally, by Connie Butler, MoMa's drawings curator, who is also the curator of the Los Angeles show.

In her panel talk she said that when she was agonizing over what choices of work to make for the "Wack!" exhibition, the art historian Moira Roth suggested, brilliantly, that she just eliminate objects altogether. Instead, Ms. Roth said, why not invite all the artists who made them to come the museum for a group-consciousness-raising session, film the session, and then make the film the show?

Somewhat unexpectedly, signs of a raised consciousness were evident among young people in the MoMA audience, the kind of people we are told either have no knowledge of feminism or outright reject it. In the question-and-answer sessions after each panel, the most passionate, probing and agitating questions and statements came from young women who identified themselves as students or artists.

When they spoke; when Richard Meyer, a gay art historian, spoke about queer feminism; and when Ms. Mutu ended her presentation by simply reading aloud a long list of curators, scholars and artists — all of them women, all of them black — who, could and should have been at the MoMA symposium, I had a sense that a feminist future was, if not secure, at least under vigilant consideration.

In trying to create a brighter future for quarterback Eli Manning, Giants Coach Tom Coughlin continues to reach into his own past.

In 1997, Coughlin, then the coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars, hired Chris Palmer as his offensive coordinator. Palmer replaced Kevin Gilbride, who had taken the head-coaching position with the San Diego Chargers.

Coughlin has made a similar move now, hiring Palmer as the Giants' quarterbacks coach to replace Gilbride, who was elevated to offensive coordinator. An announcement is expected today.

Palmer, 57, spent last season as the quarterbacks coach for the Dallas Cowboys, who changed to the inexperienced quarterback Tony Romo from the veteran Drew Bledsoe at midseason, with good results.

Palmer was the offensive coordinator of the Jaguars in 1997 and 1998. In 1997, Mark Brunell led the American Football Conference in passer rating and was named to the Pro Bowl.

In 1999, Palmer became the coach of the expansion Cleveland Browns. He was fired after two seasons; quarterback Tim Couch, chosen with the first overall pick in the 1999 draft, struggled to live up to expectations.

From 2002 to 2005, Palmer was the offensive coordinator of the Houston Texans, helping develop another No. 1 overall pick, quarterback David Carr.

The tie between Palmer and Gilbride runs deep. Each played quarterback at Southern Connecticut State — Palmer graduated in 1972, two years before Gilbride. Both are in the university's Sports Hall of Fame.

Palmer's first coaching experience in the N.F.L. was as the receivers coach for the Houston Oilers from 1990 to 1992. Gilbride was the team's offensive coordinator.

The Giants were 8-8 in 2006 and lost six of their final eight regular-season games. They made the National Football Conference playoffs as a wild-card team, but lost to the Philadelphia Eagles in the first round.

Before the final regular-season game, Coughlin stripped the offensive coordinator John Hufnagel of his responsibilities and handed them to Gilbride.

Manning, the first choice in the 2004 draft, was inconsistent most of the season and showed few signs of progress from the previous season.

"I've only had one quarterbacks coach in the N.F.L.," Manning said during a conference call Thursday when asked about his ideal coach. "I'm just looking for someone who's obviously smart, intelligent. Someone who we can have a good relationship and just really communicate well together and be on the same page with things. Someone who has good drills and is going to be hard on me and coach me and make sure that everything that I'm doing, I'm doing to get better."

Filed at 2:56 p.m. ET

AP National Writer Paul Newberry is covering the sights and sounds surrounding Super Bowl XLI in Miami and filing daily reports:

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Wednesday, Jan. 31.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) -- Decisions, decisions.

The Indianapolis Colts have just finished their media availability -- you know, the daily round-table where guys answer the same ol' questions for about the 50th time this week -- and I'm faced with a quandary.

Should I head back to Miami Beach for another round of scintillating news conferences ... or, should I hang out at the Colts' hotel for the rest of the afternoon?

Let me tell you, Indianapolis has favored status at this Super Bowl in more ways than one. While the Chicago Bears are assigned to a hotel near Miami International Airport, with glorious views of planes landing and taking off, the Colts are trying to get by at a beachside resort in Fort Lauderdale.

At this very moment, I'm looking out on the sparkling blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean. It's got to be at least 70 degrees. There's not a cloud in the sky. A gentle breeze is rolling onshore.

I could go parasailing. Or rent a jet ski. Or just hang out on one of those comfy looking beach chairs, getting some much-needed sun for my pale winter skin.

I'm sure there's a way to justify this as real work. What if Peyton Manning got a sunburn? I could spring into action for the exclusive interview (assuming I haven't dozed off myself). What if Adam Vinatieri gets a sand spur in that valuable right foot? That scoop would belong to me.

So, should I stay or should I go?

I guess it's time to go.

Who says this isn't a tough job?

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TUESDAY, Jan. 30:

MIAMI -- It's Super Bowl Media Day -- time to play my own version of ''Mission: Impossible.''

Peyton Manning is the target. The goal? Ask a question of the Indianapolis Colts' star quarterback.

This will require some advanced planning, so I grab a chart handed out by the NFL. Drawing on the expertise gained during my aborted career as a CIA spy (disclaimer: not everything you read in this blog is true), I deduce that Manning will hanging out for a full hour on podium No. 4, which is set up near the 25-yard line of Dolphin Stadium.

Granted, I'm not actually writing a story on Manning. I don't really need to ask him anything. But if the Super Bowl is for the players (along with the TV networks and corporate sponsors), then Super Bowl Media Day is for the journalists.

This is our chance to shine. This is a chance to show that we really belong. This is our chance to show that we can ask the hard questions, along with the questions that are hard to ask.

What's that you say? Getting off one question in one hour doesn't sound all that tough? Well, it's obvious that you've never been to this human traffic jam on steroids, having an elbow jammed in your ribs or a camera banged off the side of your head.

As a veteran of past Super Bowls, I know this one solitary question is hardly a shoe-in. Manning is the most prominent player in the title game. I'll have lots of competition, hundreds of would-be interrogators ranging from serious journalists -- hey, there's Pulitzer Prize-winner Dave Anderson of The New York Times -- to the folks just milking their moment in the spotlight. Yep, those two guys who were dissed by Simon on ''American Idol'' somehow got through the gate, one wearing Manning's No. 18 jersey, the other decked out in the No. 54 of Chicago Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher.

For my purposes, they're all the enemy, the sort of people who will be vying for Manning's precious attention. I'll need to bring my A-game. I'll need to give 110 percent. I know there's no tomorrow (well, actually, both teams will be available Wednesday and Thursday at their team hotels, but that doesn't count).

Always one to arrive fashionably late, I saunter toward Manning's spot about 10 minutes into this 60-minute affair, hoping that some of the weaklings will already have given up. No such luck -- he's engulfed by a horde of reporters, cameras and recorders.

One of the more resourceful devices is a long metal pole with a camera taped to the top. Too bad I can't mount myself on top of a pole.

Right away, I'm able to maneuver directly in front of the quarterback, a seemingly prime spot though I'm stuck behind a five-deep pileup. No need to start shouting yet. I'll bide my time, let the others tire themselves out, then move in for the kill.

Five minutes after I arrive, I'm able to slide into the four-deep position. Should I start yelling? Not yet.

Soon, I'm distracted by a cameraman, clicking away at 7 o'clock (right behind my left ear). I turn and give him the look of death. He apologizes and backs away.

Then, a correspondent from ''Entertainment Tonight'' steals the spotlight, just sauntering right up to announce that he's come to present Manning with some sort of mock award. The quarterback is clearly distracted by the shiny glass trophy, because he turns toward the ET camera right away.

Dang, I should have brought a present to give Manning.

The minutes are ticking away -- literally, in large numbers on the stadium scoreboard. Thirty-five minutes to go. Thirty minutes to go. I'm going to have to make my move.

''Pey ...!'' That's all I get off before someone else out-hollers me.

''Peyton ...!'' A little better, but he still doesn't look.

Another problem has arisen. I had several potential questions to fire at Manning, but most of them have already been asked. I need some fresh material. Fortunately, my co-worker from Chicago walks up from behind, asking if Manning has said anything about Urlacher.

What a break! I volunteer to ask the question.

And what's this? A spot right up front has opened, but Sal Paolantonio from ESPN cuts me off at the pass. And, in a brilliant maneuver, he also interrupts my next attempt -- after I've already gotten out, ''Hey Peyton, how do you account ...''

Damn those TV guys, with their perfect hair and pressed suits!

But I don't miss my next chance, getting off the inquiry in its entirety. It's taken a full half hour, but I've made it with 22 minutes to go. Manning looks duly impressed at my interrogating techniques, responding with a long, thoughtful answer.

When he's finished, I mouth the words ''thank you'' and walk away. I should have brought a ''Mission Accomplished'' banner to unfurl on top of the stadium.

Looking back, I spot an attractive woman positioned on top of a riser, shrieking toward the podium: ''Peyton! Peyton! Peyton!'' He doesn't even look up.

Rookie.

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MONDAY, Jan. 29:

MIAMI (AP) -- We turned right, sped up the ramp ... and saw nothing but red lights staring back at us as we merged onto Interstate 95. Welcome to South Florida and all its glorious sprawl.

Riding with a colleague to the Indianapolis Colts' hotel in nearby Fort Lauderdale, I got my first sustained glimpse of this area's notorious traffic. Even though the expected 30-minute drive wound up taking more than an hour, it wasn't that big a deal for someone who's based in Atlanta, where gridlock is an accepted way of life.

Besides, we made it to the hotel with a few minutes to spare, wading through fans and groupies camped out in the lobby for the Colts' arrival Monday evening.

Security officers were everywhere -- guarding elevators, searching bags and checking credentials at the entrance to the massive tent where interviews were held with coach Tony Dungy and a small assortment of players (Sorry, no Peyton Manning. He won't be available until Tuesday's media confab at Dolphin Stadium).

One woman tried to pull a fast one just before the interviews started, arriving at the door without a credential and proclaiming that she was with a journalist who had just walked in.

The guard wasn't buying her story. He shouted out to the reporter, asking if they were together. ''I've never seen her before'' was the reply.

Nice try.

Taking the podium first, Dungy was asked if his players might be tempted by the myriad of opportunities for getting into trouble during Super Bowl week. Good question. Remember what happened the last time the NFL played its championship game in Miami?

In 1999, Atlanta safety Eugene Robinson was arrested the night before the big game, charged with soliciting sex from an undercover police officer. Not surprisingly, the Falcons were whipped 34-19 by the Denver Broncos.

''We did talk about what happened to some other guys at the Super Bowl,'' Dungy said, without naming names.

Meanwhile, plenty of journalists have been complaining about their digs at the main media hotel, sharing their supposed horror stories when they weren't listening to cliches. The rooms are shabby. It's inconvenient. Heck, they don't even have HBO.

Of course, this is par for the course when it comes to sportswriters, who must have to take a course in Whining 101 on their way through college. They have one of the best jobs in the world -- if you can call it a job -- but all they do is talk about their hardships.

They won't get much sympathy from those folks who don't get an all-expenses-paid trip to the country's biggest sporting event.

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MIAMI (AP) -- Let the press conferences begin!

A steady stream of talking heads paraded through the Super Bowl media center, discussing everything from the coolest weather of the season (it's dipping into the low 50s) to the state of security (which is ''Level 1,'' in case you were wondering).

This being Miami, it didn't take long for someone to bring up that ailing leader to the south. Cuban expatriates are making plans for an official celebration whenever Fidel Castro dies, but what happens if he passes away DURING the Super Bowl?

Not to worry. Robert Parker, who runs the Miami-Dade Police Department, said the city has come up with a plan for just such an occurrence and even rehearsed it. ''We did a tabletop exercise just this morning,'' he said.

Whew, that's a relief.

Next to Castro, the most pressing security issue involved that most American of pastimes. Call this one Tailgating -- er -- Gate, because the NFL won't be letting anyone grill brats in the parking lot before the game. Yep, you heard me right. At the biggest football game of the season, tailgating is actually BANNED.

The NFL's security honcho, Milt Alherich, pointed to a lack of parking space and a need to maintain tight control over the area around Dolphin Stadium. And listen to this spin on things: ''It's for the fans,'' he said. ''It's for the convenience of the fans and the safety of the fans.''

Hmmm. Somehow, I don't think the fans will see it that way.

One other thing stood out during the news conference on security. Julie Torres, an ATF agent who's leading the federal effort on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security, was asked just what it means to be a ''Level 1'' event.

Well, she explained, the Iraqi elections were ''Level 2,'' which means the feds didn't assign as many agents to watch over things as they'll have at the Super Bowl. Doesn't that sound like a strange sense of priorities?

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SUNDAY, Jan. 28:

MIAMI (AP) -- The Super Bowl countdown has started -- yep, only one week to go -- but the hype is still at the lukewarm stage.

Other than a few signs hanging at Miami International Airport (''One Game, One Dream,'' they proclaimed with typical NFL melodrama), it seemed like just another day in this winter mecca. Snowbirds arriving for some much-needed Sun & Surf. A British couple on vacation, not at all interested in this American brand of football. And, of course, the airline delivering a broken piece of luggage on the carousel, along with this infuriating disclaimer.

''We're not responsible for any damage to the wheels and handles,'' an agent said. Oh well, I guess I'll be dragging this one the rest of the way.

The media enclave is set up in the Miami Beach Convention Center, which is right next to the Jackie Gleason Theatre (an ode to another glorious era of partying and debauchery in this town). Out front, a cadre of orange-jacketed security officers stood ready to search every computer bag that came through the doors. Mostly, they just stood around. The cavernous hall was largely empty, the literal calm before the storm in what has become a de facto American holiday. The only signs of life were provided by the NFL Network, blaring from every television as they breathlessly marked the arrival of the Chicago Bears.

And what about the Indianapolis Colts? Join us again Monday night -- that's when they'll be touching down.

It wasn't until I turned the corner onto Ocean Drive in search of my hotel that I got my first taste of what's to come. The South Beach traffic was bumper to bumper (OK, so it's probably that way most nights in this land of roped-off clubs and scanty attire, but work with me here). And what's that creeping along in the opposite lane? Yep, it's a white stretch Hummer.

Ahhh, now it feels like a Super Bowl.

BAGHDAD, Jan. 28 — Staff Sgt. Hector Leija scanned the kitchen, searching for illegal weapons. One wall away, in an apartment next door, a scared Shiite family huddled around a space heater, cradling an infant.

It was after 9 a.m. on Wednesday, on Haifa Street in central Baghdad, and the crack-crack of machine-gun fire had been rattling since dawn. More than a thousand American and Iraqi troops had come to this warren of high rises and hovels to disrupt the growing nest of Sunni and Shiite fighters battling for control of the area.

The joint military effort has been billed as the first step toward an Iraqi takeover of security. But this morning, in the two dark, third-floor apartments on Haifa Street, that promise seemed distant. What was close, and painfully real, was the cost of an escalating street fight that had trapped American soldiers and Iraqi bystanders between warring sects.

And as with so many days here, a bullet changed everything.

It started at 9:15 a.m.

"Help!" came the shout. "Man down."

"Sergeant Leija got hit in the head," yelled Specialist Evan Woollis, 25, his voice carrying into the apartment with the Iraqi family. The soldiers from the sergeant's platoon, part of the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, rushed from one apartment to the other.

In the narrow kitchen, a single bullet hole could be seen in a tinted glass window facing north.

The platoon's leader, Sgt. First Class Marc Biletski, ordered his men to get down, away from every window, and to pull Sergeant Leija out of the kitchen and into the living room.

"O.K., everybody, let's relax," Sergeant Biletski said. But he was shaking from his shoulder to his hand.

Relaxing was just not possible. Fifteen feet of floor and a three-inch-high metal doorjamb stood between where Sergeant Leija fell and the living room, out of the line of fire. Gunshots popped in bursts, their source obscured by echoes off the concrete buildings.

"Don't freak out on me, Doc," Sergeant Biletski shouted to the platoon medic, Pfc. Aaron Barnum, who was frantically yanking at Sergeant Leija's flak jacket to take the weight off his chest. "Don't freak out."

Two minutes later, three soldiers rushed to help, dragging the sergeant from the kitchen. A medevac team then rushed in and carried him to a Stryker armored vehicle outside, around 9:20. He moaned as they carried him down the stairs on a stretcher.

The men of the platoon remained in the living room, frozen in shock. They had a problem. Sergeant Leija's helmet, flak jacket, gear and weapon, along with that of at least one other soldier, were still in the exposed area of the kitchen. They needed to be recovered. But how?

"We don't know if there's friendlies in that building," said Sgt. Richard Coleman, referring to the concrete complex a few feet away from where Sergeant Leija had been shot. Sergeant Biletski, 39, decided to wait. He called for another unit to search and clear the building next door.

The additional unit needed time, and got lost. The men sat still. Sergeant B, as his soldiers called him, was near the wall farthest from the kitchen, out of sight from the room's wide, shaded window. Sergeant Woollis, Private Barnum, Sergeant Coleman and Specialist Terry Wilson sat around him.

Together, alone, trapped in a dark room with the blood of their comrade on the floor, they tried to piece together what had happened. Maybe the sniper saw Sergeant Leija's silhouette in the window and fired. Or maybe the shot was accidental, they said, fired from below by Iraqi Army soldiers who had been moving between the buildings.

Sergeant Woollis cited the available evidence — an entrance wound just below the helmet with an exit wound above. He said the shot must have been fired from the ground.

The Iraqis were not supposed to even be there yet. The plan had been for Sergeant Leija's squad to work alongside an Iraqi Army unit all day. But after arriving late at the first building, the Iraqis jumped ahead, leaving the Americans and pushing north without searching dozens of apartments in the area.

The Iraqi soldiers below the kitchen window had once again skipped forward. An American officer later said the Iraqis were brave to push ahead toward the most intense gunfire.

But Sergeant Leija's squad had no communication links with their Iraqi counterparts, and because it was an Iraqi operation — as senior officers repeatedly emphasized — the Americans could not order the Iraqis to get back in line. There was nothing they could do.

9:40 a.m.

An Iraqi soldier rushed in and then stopped, seemingly surprised by the Americans sitting around him. He stood in the middle of the darkened living room, inches away from bloody bandages on the carpet.

"Get away from the window!"

The soldiers yelled at their interpreter, a masked Iraqi whom they called Santana. Between their shouts and his urgent Arabic, the Iraqi soldier got the message. He slowly walked away.

A few minutes later it happened again. This time, the Iraqi lingered.

"What part of 'sniper' don't you understand?" Sergeant Biletski yelled. The other soldiers cursed and called the Iraqis idiots. They were still not sure whether an Iraqi soldier was responsible for Sergeant Leija's wound, but they said the last thing they wanted was another casualty. In a moment of emotion, Private Barnum said, "I won't treat him if he's hit."

When the second Iraqi left, an airless silence returned. The dark left people alone to grieve. "You O.K.? " Sergeant B asked each soldier. A few nods. A few yeses.

Private Barnum stood up, facing the kitchen, eager to bring back the gear left. One foot back, the other forward, he stood like a sprinter. "I can get that stuff, Sergeant," he said. "I can get it."

The building next door had still not been cleared by Americans. The answer was no.

"I can't lose another man," Sergeant B said. "If I did, I failed. I already failed once. I'm not going to fail again."

The room went quiet. Faces turned away. "You didn't fail, sir," said one of the men, his voice disguised by the sound of fighting back tears. "You didn't fail."

9:55 a.m.

The piercing cry of an infant was easily identifiable, even as the gunfire outside intensified. It came from the apartment next door. The Iraqi Army had been there, too. In an interview before Sergeant Leija was shot, the three young Iraqis there said that their father had been taken by the soldiers.

"Someone from over there" — they pointed back away from Haifa Street, toward the rows of mud-brick slums — "told them we had weapons," said a young man, who seemed to be about 18.

He was sitting on a couch. To his right, his older sister clutched an infant in a blanket; his younger sister, about 16, sat on the other side.

The young man said the family was Shiite. He said the supposed informants were Sunni Arabs who wanted their apartment.

The truth of his claim was impossible to verify, but it was far from the day's only confounding tip. Earlier that morning, an Iraqi boy of about 8 ran up to Sergeant Leija. He wanted to tell the Americans about terrorists hiding in the slums behind the apartment buildings on Haifa Street's eastern side.

Sergeant Leija, an easygoing 27-year-old from Raymondville, Tex., ignored him. He and some of his soldiers said it was impossible to know whether the boy had legitimate information or would lead them to an ambush.

That summed up intelligence in Iraq, they said: there is always the threat of being set up, for an attack or an Iraqi's own agenda.

The Iraqi Army did not seem worried about such concerns, according to the family. The three young Iraqis said they were glad that the Americans had come. Maybe they could help find their father.

10:50 a.m.

Sergeant. Coleman tried using a mop to get the gear, and failed. It was too far away. With more than an hour elapsed since the attack, and after no signs of another shot through the kitchen window, Sergeant B agreed to let Private Barnum make a mad dash for the equipment.

Private Barnum waited for several minutes in the doorway, peeking around the corner, stalling. Then he dove forward, pushing himself up against the wall near the window to cut down the angle, pausing, then darting back to the camouflaged kit.

Crack — a single gunshot. Private Barnum looked back at the kitchen window, his eyes squeezed with fear. His pace quickened. He cleared the weapons' chambers and tossed them to the living room. Then he threw the flak jackets and bolt cutters.

He picked up Sergeant Leija's helmet, cradled it in his arms, then made the final dangerous move back to the living room, his fatigues indelibly stained with his friend's blood. There were no cheers to greet him. It was a brave act borne of horror, and the men seemed eager to go.

As Private Barnum gingerly wrapped the helmet in a towel, it tipped and blood spilled out.

11:15 a.m.

Sergeant B sat down on a chair outside the two apartments and used the radio to find out if they would be heading back to base or moving forward. He was told to stay put until after an airstrike on a building 500 yards away.

The platoon, looking for cover, returned to the Iraqis' apartment, where they found the family as they were before — on the couch, in the dark, around the heater.

Specialist Wilson continued the conversation he started before the gunshot two hours earlier. The young Iraqi man said again that the Iraqi Army had taken his father. "Will you come back to help?" he asked.

"We didn't take him," Specialist Wilson said. "The I.A. took him. If he didn't do anything wrong, he should be back."

The Iraqi family nodded, as if they had heard this before.

Speaking together — none of them gave their names — they said they had lived in the apartment for 16 years. Ten days ago, before the Americans arrived, Sunnis told them they would kill every Shiite in the building if they did not leave immediately. So they fled to a neighborhood in southern Baghdad where some Shiites had started to gather in abandoned homes. But again, a threat came: leave or die. So less than a week ago, the family returned to Haifa Street.

And now the airstrike was coming.

Sergeant B told the family that they should go into a back room for safety. He asked if they wanted to take the heater with them (they did not), and he reminded everyone to keep their mouths open to protect their inner ears against the airstrike's shockwave.

A boom, then another even louder explosion hit, shaking dust from the walls. One of blasts came from a mortar shell that hit the building, the soldier said. The family stayed, but for the Americans, it was time to go.

12:30 p.m.

Over the next few hours, the platoon combined sprints across open alleyways with bouts of rest in empty makeshift homes. Under what sounded like constant gunfire, the soldiers moved behind the Iraqi soldiers, staying close.

At one point, the Iraqis detained a man who they said had videos of himself shooting American soldiers. The Iraqi soldiers slapped him in the head as they walked him past.

About an hour later, a sniper wounded two Iraqi soldiers who were mingling outside a squat apartment like teenagers at a 7-11. Private Barnum wrapped their wounds with American bandages. He and the rest of the platoon had been inside, taking cover.

"Stay away from the windows," Sergeant B kept repeating. The point was clear: don't let it happen again. Don't fail.

4 p.m.

Downstairs in the lobby of a mostly abandoned high rise on Haifa Street, the sergeant and his men sat on the floor, exhausted. They were waiting for their Stryker to return so they could head back to base. In 14 hours, they had moved through a stretch of eight buildings on Haifa Street. They had been scheduled to clear 18.

Upstairs, Iraqi soldiers searched rooms and made themselves at home in empty apartments. Many were spacious, even luxurious, with elevators opening into wide hallways and grand living rooms splashed with afternoon sun.

Under Saddam Hussein, Haifa Street had been favored by Baath Party officials and wealthy foreigners. The current residents seemed to have fled in an instant; in one apartment, a full container of shaving cream was left in the bathroom. In that apartment's living room, a band of Iraqi soldiers settled in, relaxing on blue upholstered couches and listening to a soccer game on a radio they found in a closet.

They looked comfortable, like they were waiting to be called to dinner.

Sergeant B and Specialist Woollis, meanwhile, talked about what they would eat when they got back to their homes in California. The consensus was chili dogs and burgers.

Sergeant B also said he missed his 13-year-old son, who was growing up without him, playing football, learning to become a man with an absentee father. After 17 years in the Army, he said, he was thinking that maybe his family had put up with enough.

"I don't see how you can do this," he said, "and not be damaged."

A few hours later, the word came in: Sergeant Leija had died.