A WOMAN'S PREROGATIVE
Issue of 2002-01-07
Posted 2001-12-31
The women of Afghanistan do not wish to be freed from the strictures of the Taliban only to submit to a Western model of women's liberation, or so various of their representatives have reminded well-meaning American feminists during the past several weeks. "Bring your democracy, not your bikinis" is how Zohra Yusuf Daoud, Miss Afghanistan of 1973, put it to the audience of a recent conference in New York co-sponsored by Women for Afghan Women. In fact, there are a number of women in this country whose theological distaste for the bikini is combined with an appreciation for civil rights: American Muslim feminists. Some of these women read the Koran as a document that secures women's rights rather than as a blueprint for oppression, in spite of the evidence, throughout the Muslim world, of the originality of such an interpretation. The picture they present of God's plan for women is not quite consistent with American-style equality; instead, it suggests that the Muslim woman would be the most pampered, privileged creature on the planet, if only she knew her due.
Azizah al-Hibri, a Lebanese-American professor of law at the University of Richmond, in Virginia, who is an expert in the prenuptial contract that traditionally regulates every Muslim marriage, argues that, according to Islamic jurisprudence based on the Koran, the contract can be used as an instrument by which a woman can lay out her expectations about the shape she would like her marriage, and thus her life, to take. "It goes back to the very early days of Islam, when it was understood that women entered marriage equally, unlike previous regimes, in which she was chattel," al-Hibri says. A woman can secure her right to work outside the home at any job she likes; she can reassert her right to have her husband support her financially, even if she has a job or is independently wealthy; she can keep her finances separate from his and invest them wherever she wishes; she can specify the sum of money she expects to receive should the marriage end in divorce or should she be widowed; she can negotiate the right to divorce her husband at will, should he, for example, take another wife; she can reserve the right not to cook, to clean, or to nurse her own children.
Some American Muslim women even argue that Islam anticipates the demands of Western feminists by more than a thousand years: a stay-at-home wife can specify that she expects to receive a regular stipend, which is not that far from the goals of the Wages for Housework campaign of the nineteen-seventies. Elsewhere, the fully empowered Muslim woman sounds like a self-assured, post-feminist type—a woman who draws her inspiration from the example of Sukayna, the brilliant, beautiful great-granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad, who was married several times, and, at least once, stipulated in writing that her husband was forbidden to disagree with her about anything.All these conditions are based on the canon of Islam and on early Muslim practice, al-Hibri says, but they are rarely applied, since centuries of male-dominated culture have so obscured the essential equality of the sexes at the core of Islamic marriage that a woman's failure to include these provisions in the marriage contract can be understood as implying that she has waived them.
For non-Muslims who fret about the high divorce rate in this country, the concept of a negotiated marital contract that makes explicit the financial, social, and even sexual expectations that each partner brings to the union has a certain appeal. Although wealthy Americans may have discovered the usefulness of the prenup, the dominant view of marriage in American culture is that it is a largely romantic endeavor rather than an arrangement based, at least in part, on pragmatism. Unfortunately, most Islamic marriages bear about as much relation to this paradigm as most American marriages bear to a Nora Ephron movie. Marriage contracts generally go no further than specifying the size of the bride's mahr—a sort of dowry the groom must pay her—because many Muslim women are illinformed of their rights, and, even if they do know them, lack the financial and social leverage to assert them. Things are even tougher for a woman who might prefer not to marry, or is obliged to remain single. And al-Hibri's pro-woman readings of the Koran are, at times, less than persuasive: in a recent essay for the Journal of Law & Religion, she acknowledges that the Koran permits a husband to beat his wife, though she argues that a correct reading of the verse indicates that he should use nothing more injurious than a miswak, a twig that commonly serves as a toothbrush in the Arabian peninsula.
A group of Muslim women in Washington, among them Sima Wali, a delegate to the Afghan conference in Bonn last month, has been drawing up a list of legislative recommendations for a reconstructed Afghanistan, including a woman's right to vote and her right of access to medical treatment. Also included is the suggestion that girls receive marriage-contract education in the schools when, as it is hoped, they return to them in the spring. If a particularly bright young Afghan girl should ask why, if Islam is predicated on equality and harmony between the sexes, a woman should be advised to load her contract with conditions that restrict her husband's capacity to exploit her, al-Hibri has an answer. "The way I explain it is that God understands patriarchy, because God created man," she says. "He realized immediately that women need affirmative action." American feminists have never been particularly celebrated for a sense of irony; Afghan feminists, assuredly, will need one.
— Rebecca Mead


WHAT COMES NATURALLY
by LOUIS MENAND
Does evolution explain who we are?
Issue of 2002-11-25
Posted 2002-11-18
"The new sciences of human nature." Well, why not? The old sciences of human nature didn't have such a fabulous track record. They gave us segregated drinking fountains, "invented spelling," and the glass ceiling—all consequences of scientific theories about the way human beings really are. Possibly, there is a lesson there, which is that the sciences of human nature tend to validate the practices and preferences of whatever regime happens to be sponsoring them. In totalitarian regimes, dissidence is treated as a mental illness. In apartheid regimes, interracial contact is treated as unnatural. In free-market regimes, self-interest is treated as hardwired. Maybe this is unfair to the new sciences of human nature, though. It could be that the problem with the old sciences was simply that they weren't scientific enough—that they were mostly wishful thinking projected onto dubious data about skull size and the effects of estrogen on the ability to balance a checkbook. Today's scientists might have the capacity to get right down there among the chromosomes and the neurotransmitters, and to send back reports, undistorted by fear, favor, or the prospect of funding, about what's going on. Maybe the new sciences of human nature are really scientific. It's worth a look.
Steven Pinker is a psychology professor at M.I.T. and the author of an entertaining and popular book on language (his specialty), called "The Language Instinct," and a more wide-ranging volume, also popular, called "How the Mind Works." His new book, "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" (Viking; $27.95), recycles some of the material published in "How the Mind Works" but puts it to a more prescriptive use. Pinker has a robust faith in "the new sciences of human nature" (his phrase)—he was formerly the director of M.I.T.'s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience—but his views in "The Blank Slate" are based almost entirely on two branches of the new sciences: evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics.
These are both efforts to explain mind and behavior biologically, as products of natural selection and genetic endowment. Unless you are a creationist, there is nothing exceptionable about the approach. If opposable thumbs are the result of natural selection, there is no reason not to assume that the design of the brain is as well. And if we inherit our eye color and degree of hairiness from our ancestors we probably inherit our talents and temperaments from them, too. The question isn't whether there is a biological basis for human nature. We're organisms through and through; biology goes, as they say, all the way down. The question is how much biology explains about life out here on the twenty-first-century street.
Pinker's idea is that it explains much more than some people—he calls these people "intellectuals"—think it does, and that the failure, or refusal, to acknowledge this has led to many regrettable things, including the French Revolution, modern architecture, and the crimes of Josef Stalin. Intellectuals deny biology, according to Pinker, because it interferes with their pet theories of mind and behavior. These are the Blank Slate (the belief that the mind is wholly shaped by the environment), the Noble Savage (the notion that people are born good but are corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (the idea that there is a nonbiological agent in our heads with the power to change our nature at will). The "intellectuals" in Pinker's book are social scientists, progressive educators, radical feminists, academic Marxists, liberal columnists, avant-garde arts types, government planners, and postmodernist relativists. The good guys are the cognitive scientists and ordinary folks, whose common sense, except when it has been damaged by listening to intellectuals, generally correlates with what cognitive science has discovered. I wish I could say that Pinker's view of the world of ideas is more nuanced than this.
Many pages of "The Blank Slate" are devoted to bashing away at the Lockean-Rousseauian-Cartesian scarecrow that Pinker has created. What the new sciences show, he says, is that, contrary to "the romanticism of intellectuals," nurture is usually no match for nature. Rehabilitation often fails to cure violent criminals; identical twins raised separately exhibit uncanny similarities; reading bedtime stories has little effect on I.Q. Findings like these suggest that there are limits to what we can expect from efforts to make people happier, smarter, and better citizens by manipulating their environment. When revolutionaries remake society from the ground up, on the theory that a new kind of human being will emerge, or when feminists argue that if little boys played with dolls and teacups the world would be a less violent place, they are, in Pinker's view, breaking eggs with no hope of an omelette. They are simply frustrating drives and instincts that will find an outlet sooner or later. It's not nice to fool human nature.

But where does this leave us? There are limits, after all, to the idea of limits. We manipulate the environment constantly in order to shape attitudes and behavior. We employ police to intimidate people into obeying traffic signs and anti-littering ordinances; we require kids to go to school; we air-condition workplaces and provide them with coffee stations. Peer pressure constrains the expression of sexual desire. Happy hours relieve feelings of stress. Religious services inspire people to do good works. Most of life is conducted in an environment of man-made stimulants and inhibitors, incentives and deterrents. Many impulses are channelled or suppressed, and many talents and feelings are acquired, and have no specific genetic basis or evolutionary logic at all. Music appreciation, for instance, seems to be wired in at about the level of "Hot Cross Buns." But people learn to enjoy Wagner. They even learn to sing Wagner. One suspects that enjoying Wagner, singing Wagner, anything to do with Wagner, is in gross excess of the requirements of natural selection. To say that music is the product of a gene for "art-making," naturally selected to impress potential mates—which is one of the things Pinker believes—is to say absolutely nothing about what makes any particular piece of music significant to human beings. No doubt Wagner wished to impress potential mates; who does not? It is a long way from there to "Parsifal."
Pinker doesn't care much for art, though. When he does care for something—cognitive science, for example—he is all in favor of training people to do it, even though, as he admits, many of the methods and assumptions of modern science are counter-intuitive. The fact that innate mathematical ability is still in the Stone Age distresses him; he has fewer problems with Stone Age sex drives. He objects to using education "to instill desirable attitudes toward the environment, gender, sexuality, and ethnic diversity"; but he insists that "the obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education." He thinks that we should be teaching economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics, even if we have to stop teaching literature and the classics. It's O.K. to rewire people's "natural" sense of a just price or the movement of a subatomic particle, in other words, but it's a waste of time to tinker with their untutored notions of gender difference.
Having it both ways is an irritating feature of "The Blank Slate." Pinker can write, in refutation of the scarecrow theory of violent behavior, "The sad fact is that despite the repeated assurances that 'we know the conditions that breed violence,' we barely have a clue," and then, a few pages later, "It is not surprising, then, that when African American teenagers are taken out of underclass neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than white teenagers." Well, that should give us one clue. He sums the matter up: "With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution." This is just another way of saying that it is in human nature to socialize and to be socialized, which is, pragmatically, exactly the view of the "intellectuals."
The insistence on deprecating the efficacy of socialization leads Pinker into absurdities that he handles with a blitheness that would be charming if his self-assurance were not so overdeveloped. He argues, for example, that democracy, the rule of law, and women's reproductive freedom are all products of evolution. The Founding Fathers understood that the ideas of power sharing and individual rights are grounded in human nature. And he quotes, with approval, the claim of two evolutionary psychologists that the "evolutionary calculus" explains why women evolved "to exert control over their own sexuality, over the terms of their relationships, and over the choice of which men are to be the fathers of their children." Now, democracy, individual rights, and women's sexual autonomy are concepts almost nowhere to be found, even in the West, before the eighteenth century. Either human beings spent ten thousand years denying their own nature by slavishly obeying the whims of the rich and powerful, cheerfully burning heretics at the stake, and arranging their daughters' marriages (which would imply a pretty effective system of socialization), or modern liberal society is largely a social construction. Which hypothesis seems more plausible?

In 1859, Charles Darwin announced his conclusion that all life forms are the result of processes that are natural, chance-generated, and blind. There is, he thought, no "meaning" to evolutionary development. Evolution is just a by-product of the fact that organisms have to compete with one another in order to survive. If there were no struggle, if some organisms didn't have to die so that others could live, there would be no development. That is all evolution amounts to. This recognition seems to have made Darwin literally sick. But, ever since "On the Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man" (1871), people have used Darwin's theory to explain why one or another way of managing human affairs is "natural." The notion is that a particular arrangement must have been "selected for"—as though the struggles among individuals and groups and ideas were nature's way of making sure that we end up with the best. Evolutionary psychology is therefore a philosophy for winners: it can be used to justify every outcome. This is why Pinker has persuaded himself that liberal democracy and current opinion about women's sexual autonomy have biological foundations. It's a "scientific" validation of the way we live now. But every aspect of life has a biological foundation in exactly the same sense, which is that unless it was biologically possible it wouldn't exist. After that, it's up for grabs.
The other trouble with evolutionary psychology is that it is not really psychology. In general, the views that Pinker derives from "the new sciences of human nature" are mainstream Clinton-era views: incarceration is regrettable but necessary; sexism is unacceptable, but men and women will always have different attitudes toward sex; dialogue is preferable to threats of force in defusing ethnic and nationalist conflicts; most group stereotypes are roughly correct, but we should never judge an individual by group stereotypes; rectitude is all very well, but "noble guys tend to finish last"; and so on. People who share these beliefs probably didn't need science to arrive at them, but the science is undoubtedly reassuring. On one subject, though, Pinker does take an unconventional position. This is the matter of child rearing.
Here Pinker relies on a 1998 book called "The Nurture Assumption," by Judith Rich Harris, which has been the object of some controversy in the field of developmental psychology. Harris claimed that "shared family environments"—that is, parents—have little or no effect on a child's personality. (Strictly speaking, she claimed that parenting does not account for the variation in differences in personality, which is what genetic science measures.) Biological siblings reared together are no more alike, or less different, than biological siblings reared in separate families. Half of personality, Harris argued, is the product of genes, and half is the product of what she called the "unique environment"—that is, the particular experiences of the individual child. Harris suggested that children's peers might be the principal source of this environmental input. This is distinctly not Clinton-era thinking. It was Hillary Clinton, after all, who sent parents of older children into a depression by announcing that personality is shaped in the first three years of life. If you missed those bedtime stories, there was apparently no way to make it up. Harris's theory makes nonsense of this anxiety, as it does of virtually all expert child-rearing advice, which Pinker calls "flapdoodle."
What is personality, though? The answer turns out to be quite specific. The new sciences of human nature have discovered that personality has exactly five dimensions: people are, in varying degrees, either open to experience or incurious, conscientious or undirected, extroverted or introverted, agreeable or antagonistic, and neurotic or stable. (This is known in the literature as the Five-Factor Model, or FFM. The five dimensions are referred to by the acronym OCEAN.) All five attributes are partly heritable, and they are what behavioral geneticists look to for a definition of personality. It seems that there is no need for finer tuning, because OCEAN accounts for everything. "Most of the 18,000 adjectives for personality traits in an unabridged dictionary can be tied to one of these five dimensions," as Pinker explains.
When Pinker and Harris say that parents do not affect their children's personalities, therefore, they mean that parents cannot make a fretful child into a serene adult. It's irrelevant to them that parents can make their children into opera buffs, water-skiers, food connoisseurs, bilingual speakers, painters, trumpet players, and churchgoers—that parents have the power to introduce their children to the whole supra-biological realm—for the fundamental reason that science cannot comprehend what it cannot measure.
Science can measure anxiety. This is not just because people will report themselves, in surveys, to be more or less anxious; it is also because a genetic basis for anxiety has been identified. People with a shorter version of a stretch of the DNA that inhibits the serotonin-transporter gene on chromosome 17 are more likely to be anxious. That chronic anxiety is biological—that it is not caused solely by circumstance—is shown by the fact that medication containing a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (that is, an anti-depressant) can relieve it. (Would medication count as nurture or as nature?) But that's just the biology. The psychology is everything that the organism does to cope with its biology. Innately anxious people develop all kinds of strategies for overcoming, disguising, avoiding, repressing, and, sometimes, exploiting their tendency to nervousness. These strategies are acquired—people aren't born with them—and they are constructed from elements that the environment provides. The mind can work only with what it knows, and one of the things it knows is parents, who often become major players in the psychic drama of anxiety maintenance. The mere fact of having "the gene for anxiety" determines nothing, which is why some anxious people become opera buffs, some become water-skiers, and some just sit and stare out the window, brooding on the fact that their parents did not read them enough bedtime stories. These people are unlikely to be relieved by learning that cognitive science has determined that bedtime stories are overrated.

An obsession with the mean point of the bell curve has sometimes led scientists to forget that the "average person" is a mathematical construct, corresponding to no actual human being. It represents, in many cases, a kind of lowest common denominator. Yet scientists like Pinker treat it as a universal species norm. The classic case of this kind of apotheosis of the average is the kind of study, reported in the Science Times, in which the ideal female face is constructed by blending all the features identified by people as most beautiful. The result is a homogenized, anodyne image with no aesthetic or erotic charge at all, far less alluring than many of the "outlying" variants used to derive it. Pinker's evolutionary theory of beauty has the same effect. "An eye for beauty," he says, "locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility—just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate." Elsewhere, he explains that "the study of evolutionary aesthetics is also documenting the features that make a face or body beautiful. The prized lineaments are those that signal health, vigor, and fertility." But if this were all the eye required the girl in the Pepsodent commercial would be the most desirable woman on earth. And the only person who thinks that is the guy in the Pepsodent commercial. People don't go for faces that deviate from the "ideal" because they can't have the ideal. They go for them because the deviation is what makes them attractive.
So it is with most of the things we care about—food, friends, recreation, art. Biology reverts to the mean; civilization does not. The mind is a fabulator. It is designed (by natural selection, if you like) to dream up ideas and experiences away from the mean. Its overriding instinct is to be counter-instinctual; otherwise, we could put consciousness to sleep at an early age. The mind has no steady state; it is (as Wallace Stevens said) never satisfied. And it induces the organism to go to fantastic lengths to develop capacities that have no biological necessity. The more defiant something is of the instinctive, the typical, and the sufficient, the more highly it is prized. This is why we have the "Guinness Book of World Records," the Gautama Buddha, and the Museum of Modern Art. They represent the repudiation of the norm.
The point is self-evident, and you might think Pinker would just fold it into his theory. But he doesn't. Deviations make him suspicious, and modern art, in his book, is the prime suspect. Pinker believes not only that evolutionary psychology can explain why human beings create and consume art (it's mostly for reasons having to do with the drive for prestige). He believes that evolutionary psychology can explain what is wrong with art today—the decline of the high-art traditions, the loss of the critic's social status, and the "pretentious and unintelligible scholarship" of contemporary humanities departments. "I will seek," he says, "a diagnosis for these three ailing endeavors."
The key, it is no surprise, is the denial of human nature. "The giveaway may be found," Pinker advises, "in a famous statement from Virginia Woolf: 'In or about December 1910, human nature changed.' " She was referring, he says, to "the new philosophy of modernism that would dominate the elite arts and criticism for much of the twentieth century, and whose denial of human nature was carried over with a vengeance to postmodernism," which is "more Marxist and far more paranoid," and which gave us "Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (a crucifix in a jar of the artist's urine), Chris Ofili's painting of the Virgin Mary smeared in elephant dung," and similar outré fare. But "Woolf was wrong," he tells us. "Human nature did not change in 1910, or in any year thereafter."
It seems that aesthetics, unlike cognitive science, is not a body of knowledge worth acquiring. Pinker thinks that any moral sophistication derived from exposure to élite art can be instilled much more effectively by "middlebrow realistic fiction or traditional education." So if people want to hang a painting of a red barn or a weeping clown above their couch, he says, "it's none of our damn business." The preference for red-barn and weeping-clown paintings has been naturally selected. In fact, the "universality of basic visual tastes" has been proved, Pinker points out, by the artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who, in 1993, surveyed people's artistic preferences for color, subject matter, style, and so on. They proceeded to make a painting that incorporated all of the top-rated elements: it was a nineteenth-century realist landscape featuring children, deer, and the figure of George Washington. Pinker notes that the painting exemplifies "the kind of landscape that had been characterized as optimal for our species by researchers in evolutionary aesthetics."
Jesus wept. To begin with, Virginia Woolf did not write, "In or about December 1910, human nature changed." What she wrote was "On or about December 1910 human character changed." The sentence appears in an essay called "Character in Fiction," which attacks the realist novelists of the time for treating character as entirely a product of outer circumstance—of environment and social class. These novelists look at people's clothes, their jobs, their houses, Woolf says, "but never . . . at life, never at human nature." Modernist fiction, on the other hand, because it presents character from the inside, shows how persistent personality is, and how impervious to circumstance. Woolf, in short, was a Pinkerite.
Pinker needed only to have looked through any trot on modernist writing to see his error. One of Woolf's principal specimens of the new, post-realist fiction was Joyce's "Ulysses," a novel about twentieth-century Dublin whose characters are all based on characters in the Odyssey. You can't get a much finer tribute to universal human nature than that. The modernists were obsessed with the perdurability of human nature. This is, as Woolf said, precisely what distinguishes them from the realists and romantics who preceded them. It's why Kandinsky "invented" abstraction (to help preserve, he said, "the element of pure and eternal art, found among all human beings, among all peoples and at all times"). It's why Picasso put African masks on the prostitutes in "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." "Heart of Darkness," "Women in Love," "A Passage to India," "Sweeney Erect," "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop"—they are as explicitly about the intractability of human aggression and desire as an evolutionary psychologist could wish. There is nothing Marxist about them. The preferred mode of orthodox Marxism was not modernism; it was realism.
"Postmodernism" might, indeed, be explained as a reaction against the modernist faith in "pure art" and human nature. But what does that have to do with beauty? Beauty is an effect produced by an object. Pinker has no more looked at the "postmodernist" work he reviles than he has read the Woolf essay he misquotes. Like Tom Wolfe, whose attacks on modern painting in "The Painted Word" he quotes, Pinker thinks that modern art is all ideas because it is only as ideas that he can experience it. In fact, Ofili's painting is not "smeared in elephant dung," and Serrano's "Piss Christ" is not "a crucifix in a jar of the artist's urine." It's a photograph of a crucifix in a jar of urine, and, technically and formally, a rather beautiful and evocative piece. It would satisfy a number of Komar and Melamid's populist criteria. Many people find it offensive, of course, but that reaction, too, is instinctive, and the discordance of the two sensations is part of the experience the object provokes. "Piss Christ" is not the most profound work of art ever created, but it is not just a crude prank.
As for Komar and Melamid's paint-by-polling: it is the art-world equivalent of the Science Times' ideal face. Komar and Melamid are satirists. They set out to find the visual lowest common denominator, and the work they produced (called "United States: Most Wanted Painting") is preposterous even as kitsch. It tells us as much about art as a single dish combining all the flavors people said they liked would tell us about cuisine. Darwin's fundamental insight as a biologist was that, among members of a species, what is important is not the similarities but the differences. If human beings were identical, a single change in the environment could wipe out the race. Similarity, ultimately, is death. So why do Darwin's followers in evolutionary psychology want to make what people have most in common into a social good?
What the new sciences of human nature seem to show, for all their investigations down there among the genes and the neural networks, is that "human nature" is as much an abstraction as "God" or "the universal law." It is a magic wand that people wave over the practices they approve of. If that makes them feel better, who can complain? Human nature is never the reason for their approval, though. It would be nice if we could justify our choices by pointing silently to our genes. But we can't. Our genes, unfortunately, are even stupider than we are. 

WASHINGTON MYSTERY
by JEFFREY FRANK
Why is it so hard to write about our nation's capital?
Issue of 2002-11-18
Posted 2002-11-11
In 1997, Katharine Graham published her autobiography, "Personal History," a book that succeeded on several levels. Mrs. Graham, who was the publisher of the Washington Post and then chairman of the company, knew a lot of interesting people and wrote about them well; and she was herself an enormously sympathetic person. Readers of her memoir, which won a Pulitzer Prize, rooted for her as they would for any modern heroine, even if her story was by then familiar: despite a sheltered life, she took charge of the family-owned newspaper after the death of her husband, hired Ben Bradlee as its editor, and saw it through its most important stories, the Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate scandal. The Post, once a provincial daily, became a great newspaper with national ambitions, and Mrs. Graham became a great publisher.
Much of what has been said about Katharine Graham is true enough: she was tough, vulnerable, smart, funny, shy, loyal, self-doubting, and brave. She was also, it turns out, pulling together material for an anthology about her home town, entitled "Katharine Graham's Washington" (Knopf; $30), which carries with it the enthusiastic subtitle "A huge, rich gathering of articles, memoirs, humor, and history, chosen by Mrs. Graham, that brings to life her beloved city." The description is only partly accurate. The anthology is indeed huge—more than eight hundred pages—and it includes charming, instructive essays by some of my former Post colleagues, and some happy surprises, such as selections from the journals of Ellen Maury Slayden, the wife of a long-forgotten congressman. But readers will find themselves going through this compilation with growing dread, and perhaps a kind of wonderment at what has been written, admired, and now republished about the nation's capital.
Katharine Graham died in the summer of 2001, at the age of eighty-four, and an editor's note reveals that the project was left unfinished. Mrs. Graham had written introductions to quite a few of the contributions and had left notes on "most of the others." The one constraint she set herself was that the pieces should have been published more or less during her lifetime. But of course there was no chance for her to rethink any of this, and so there was no chance for another of her talents—saving people from their worst selves—to assert itself. Perhaps as a result, "Katharine Graham's Washington" has an unwieldy, uncertain quality. There are ninety-some contributors, and twelve sections with generic names like "Period Pieces" and "Washington Events" and "Visitors to Washington," which suggests the absence of any organizing principle. There is a considerable amount of material that has vague historic interest (pieces by the columnist Marquis Childs in wartime Washington) or anthropological value (the 1960 memoir by Perle Mesta, the once celebrated hostess, recalling one of her parties). And there is a lot that shows off some of the most terrifyingly awful prose in the American language—for instance, Henry Kissinger's observation that "triumph seemed to fill Nixon with a premonition of ephemerality," and Jack Valenti's recollection of flying to Washington after the Kennedy assassination, when he "skimmed low across a flickering chasm of illuminated homes and darting headlights ribboning their ways in dismantled design across Washington."
Assembling an anthology about a place is invariably thankless; almost no one will be satisfied by what was put in or left out. But Washington is an especially hard place to get a grasp on, because it is not like any other city. Perhaps it isn't a city at all, for it is made up of separate pieces and layers that don't quite connect. (In a 1933 Vanity Fair piece included here, the writer Jay Franklin calls it "a political village which has become a world capital, without becoming a metropolis.") Until fairly recently, the inhabitants of the District of Columbia, which is officially a federal enclave, couldn't vote for President, and they have no voting representative in Congress. The city elects a mayor, but if the mayor misbehaves (as Marion Barry did in the days when he used crack cocaine) Congress asserts its very real federal control over the place. Residents are proud of the District's history and its wonderful sights—the National Gallery, with its Vermeers and Rembrandts; the Lincoln and Vietnam Veterans Memorials; the Air and Space Museum; the White House and Capitol, just for starters—but there is, curiously, little of the self-love that one finds in so many other American cities, probably because so many people there not only are from someplace else but hope someday to go back to that someplace else. (George W. Bush speaks for this group.) The city is about sixty per cent black, but its segregation is so complete and hard-edged that a demographic map would show a series of white neighborhoods (Chevy Chase, Spring Valley, Cleveland Park, Georgetown, and so on) mostly to the northwest and separated from the rest of it by a large park. The commercial center of gravity slips ever farther from the city's downtown—to places like Rockville and Tysons Corner and beyond to Bowie and Gaithersburg. Washington is the only city in America to have lost its baseball team twice: the original Senators moved to Minnesota (to become the Twins) in the nineteen-sixties, and the expansion Senators moved to Texas (to become the Rangers) in the seventies. Its crime rate is high, its culture is iffy, and its weather is so oppressive that, in the years before air-conditioning, some diplomats got hardship pay.
When one tries to get the place down on paper, it becomes mysteriously elusive. There are no good songs about Washington (unless you count Leadbelly's "Bourgeois Blues"), or memorable poems; nobody has written about a neighborhood like Georgetown the way Dawn Powell, say, wrote about Greenwich Village. The "Washington novel" is a genre that often begins with lines like "It was no surprise to President Mortenson that his secure telephone was ringing, but he did not recognize the twisted hand that lifted the receiver from its hook." The memoirs of diplomats, politicians, general factotums, journalists, and politicians' wives, some of them excerpted here, are rarely distinguished. Irwin Hood (Ike) Hoover, a White House usher in the pre-F.D.R. days, gets three selections, with observations like this: "Mrs. Lindbergh appeared to me a very agreeable person. . . . She had a very pleasing personality and showed every evidence of a proper sense of proportion."
Yet there are Washingtonians who love their city, and Mrs. Graham was certainly one of them. She loved the politics and the gossip and the parties; she loved being present when important people came to town. Among the engaging essays in the compilation is Mrs. Graham's foreword, in which she writes about a place where "I've always found people to see, places to go, things to do"—a Washington that people who grew up in an earlier time remember. She recalls:
I skated to and from school through the cool shade created by arching branches of overhanging trees; the streets on which the too-full trolley cars and buses took me back and forth to work; the houses, great and small, in which dramas played themselves out publicly and privately. 
There are other pleasures, some unexpected: Russell Baker, of the Times, and Philip Hamburger, of The New Yorker, are represented, but so is John Dos Passos, recording the mood of a Washington evening during the Second World War, and a journalist named Scott Hart, who writes an elegant, spare account of what it was like when F.D.R. died. It's fun to read what James Thurber and Will Rogers wrote, although not nearly as much fun as it must once have been. The journals of Mrs. Slayden, which Mrs. Graham singled out as a favorite of hers, have terrific, modern-sounding observations. From an entry of 1917:
Flag waving becomes more frantic every day. Two years ago people were "just crazy about" the tango and the turkey trot, and now the same class has taken up patriotism. Much of the talk is the merest cant, more still the seething of small minds, with the unaccustomed excitement of an idea. 
The book reprints an "anatomy" of the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April of 1968. Mrs. Graham's husband, Philip, once called journalism the first rough draft of history, and this selection shows what he meant by that. The Post staff did a first-rate job, and to read it today is as startling and disturbing as it was then.

But these are the exceptions in a collection that includes a great many descriptions of smaller events. "Our entrance into Washington was almost regal," Sondra Gotlieb, the wife of the former Canadian ambassador, wrote in 1990. "We were greeted at the door of the elegant official residence on Rock Creek Drive by Pat Thomas, the social secretary at the embassy; the enigmatic Spanish butler Rito, a sombre El Grecoesque figure in black," and on and on. There are observations that amount to no more than sightings of celebrities, like the ex-lobbyist Bobby Baker's recollection of being a Senate page: "One of my big thrills was hearing the great figures of World War II—Winston Churchill, Madam Chiang Kai-shek—when they came to address the United States Senate. . . . So great was my enthrallment that I even forgot for a few moments that I wore those hated little-boy knickers." And there is much meditation on etiquette. Some is from the expected sources, such as Perle Mesta: "I placed Democratic Speaker Sam Rayburn next to Alice Longworth, knowing she was firmly opposed to most of Sam's policies. . . . At one point, Alice started in on the Democrats' proposed twenty-dollar across-the-board tax reduction plan." Olive Ewing Clapper, a reporter's wife, writes about what happened at an "informal" picnic: "The first headache I encountered was that the extra servant I had expected failed to show up. Lelia Pinchot rescued me by bringing in her chauffeur, who helped with the serving." Even Eleanor Roosevelt (in an excerpt from the second volume of her memoirs) participates in this sort of rumination:
Then came another serious question: Should the president sit with the king on his right and the queen on his left and me on the right of the king? Or should we follow our usual custom? This was a little more difficult, but Franklin finally decided we would follow the usual custom of the United States—the king would sit on my right and the queen at Franklin's right. 
What is very peculiar is how good writers, faced with the subject of Washington, suffer bouts of badness. A few of them sound like the passengers one might hear after a long day on a tourist bus. "I am always moved by the Mall; by the Monument, our greatest work of abstract sculpture," David McCullough writes. Simone de Beauvoir disagrees, declaring that "the green esplanade that extends to the obelisk, erected in memory of George Washington, is more disheartening than the Champs-de-Mars." If this were a dinner party, you would regret the seats you were assigned.
In fact, most of the anthology is so bland and so tedious that one wonders what the alternatives might have been. It could have used selections from Gore Vidal's "Palimpsest" (which recounts his friendship with the columnist Joseph Alsop), and from Frank Rich's coming-of-age memoir, "Ghost Light," as well as something from historic black Washington, such as Jean Toomer's novel "Cane." It made sense to shy away from policy, but it is still curious to leave out Walter Lippmann, who occupied the upper left spot on the Post's op-ed page for three decades, especially when Marquis Childs and the Alsop brothers, Stewart and Joe, are well represented.
Yet, in the end, the real problem of "Katharine Graham's Washington" is the tiny world of Washington itself. It would require supernatural powers to transform Francis Biddle or Dean Acheson into charmers, or to make Alben Barkley a witty sage. Mrs. Graham, who knew and understood Washington as well as anyone, remains the same appealing person who wrote "Personal History," but it is hard to think of her as someone who was ever tied down to her city or to the past. She dashed around the world all her life, and she loved the adventure of being with people who could change it. After she retired, she tells us, it wasn't in her nature to stop working, and no doubt she enjoyed putting the pieces of this book together—sifting through magazines and books and newspaper stories that marked passages in her remarkable life. But having to read through this omnibus would probably have wearied her, and finally bored her to tears. 

UNMARITAL BLISS
Issue of 2002-12-09
Posted 2002-12-02
Dorian Solot and Marshall Miller are the founders of the Alternatives to Marriage Project and the authors of the newly published book "Unmarried to Each Other: The Essential Guide to Living Together as an Unmarried Couple," which advocates for the rights of couples who live together without being legally wed. Solot and Miller have been unmarried for nearly a decade, since they were undergraduates at Brown, and they decided to write the book because they were frustrated by the presumption of matrimony by which they were often met—the prospective landlord who wanted to know when they were getting hitched; the car-rental company that charged extra to allow Solot to be listed as a second driver. "Unmarried to Each Other" addresses couples in all kinds of unmarriages: those who can't marry because they are gay; those who won't marry because of political objections to the institution; and those who just haven't yet made up their minds. It includes practical information about how to obtain domestic-partnership rights, as well as tips to help couples figure out whether they are ready for unmarriage, such as "It would be a rude surprise to find out a year from now that your partner saw cohabitation as an unspoken engagement when you thought it would be a good way to save on rent and see how things unfolded."
The book's publication was celebrated at a party the other day, in the Upper West Side home of Ashton Applewhite and Bob Stein, who have been unmarried to each other for going on ten years. At the party, Solot, who is twenty-nine, said that when she met Miller, who is twenty-eight, she did not immediately think, Here's the man I want to be unmarried to for the rest of my life. "It was not one of those head-over-heels things," she said. Neither Miller nor Solot had actually ever popped the question of whether to become unmarried; their relationship had just evolved in that direction. Though both agree that everything is working really well as it is now, Miller said he did not rule out the possibility that things could end in un-unmarriage. "We joke that we can't get married because we've written this book," he said. "But we never say never."
Among the guests were other happily unmarried couples in their late twenties, like Joe Lowndes and Priscilla Yamin, who are both finishing their Ph.D.s in political science at the New School. Lowndes said that he had always wanted to be unmarried—"I was an activist and anarchist for years, and I am not comfortable with my private relationships being wrapped up with state policies," he explained—but that it was not until he met Yaminthat he knew he had found the woman he wanted to be unmarried to. After seven years together, they held what they called a "Commitzvah," at which they exchanged vows, drank from a kiddush cup, and handed out little bells that friends and family were asked to ring at the moment the unmarriage was sealed. The Commitzvah is described in a chapter of the book about commitment ceremonies. ("There's no reason why you can't wear the white dress, walk down the aisle, exchange I do's and rings, and dance the Electric Slide all night long.") Yamin said that being formally unmarried did add an unexpected emotional dimension to the relationship, and that both families enjoyed the Commitzvah. "My mother was very happy—she was like, 'I'll take whatever you're giving me,' " Yamin said.
Other guests at the book party were uncertain about whether unmarriage was right for them. Michael Oates Palmer, a writer for "The West Wing," said that his recent experience of unmarriage had been unnerving. "I was just unmarried to someone for the last five months," he said. "It was a relationship where I was hoping it would make the transition to not-being-unmarried status, but she decided that it should make the transition to not-being-in-a-relationship status." Palmer's friend Lockhart Steele was at the party with Salma Abdelnour, whom he said he had been seeing for nine months. Their unmarital status, though, was still somewhat undefined. "I'm unmarried to her, but we're not unmarried in Dorian and Marshall's sense of it," Steele said. "You might even say we're just dating."
— Rebecca Mead
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?021209ta_talk_mead on December 2, 2002.
TO KILL OR NOT TO KILL
by SCOTT TUROW
Coming to terms with capital punishment.
Issue of 2003-01-06
Posted 2002-12-30
When Joseph Hartzler, a former colleague of mine in the United States attorney's office in Chicago, was appointed the lead prosecutor in the trial of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, he remarked that McVeigh was headed for Hell, no matter what. His job, Hartzler said, was simply to speed up the delivery. That was also the attitude evinced by the prosecutors vying to be first to try the two Beltway sniper suspects. Given the fear and fury the multiple shootings inspired, it wasn't surprising that polls showed that Americans favored imposing what Attorney General Ashcroft referred to as the "ultimate sanction." Yet despite the retributive wrath that the public seems quick to visit on particular crimes, or criminals, there has also been, in recent years, growing skepticism about the death-penalty system in general. A significant number of Americans question both the system's over-all fairness and, given the many cases in which DNA evidence has proved that the wrong person was convicted of a crime, its ability to distinguish the innocent from the guilty.
Ambivalence about the death penalty is an American tradition.When the Republic was founded, all the states, following English law, imposed capital punishment. But the humanistic impulses that favored democracy led to questions about whether the state should have the right to kill the citizens upon whose consent government was erected. Jefferson was among the earliest advocates of restricting executions. In 1846, Michigan became the first American state to outlaw capital punishment, except in the case of treason, and public opinion has continued to vacillate on the issue. Following the Second World War and the rise and fall of a number of totalitarian governments, Western European nations began abandoning capital punishment, but their example is of limited relevance to us, since our murder rate is roughly four times the rate in Europe. One need only glance at a TV screen to realize that murder remains an American preoccupation, and the concomitant questions of how to deal with it challenge contending strains in our moral thought, pitting Old Testament against New, retribution against forgiveness.
I was forced to confront my own feelings about the death penalty as one of fourteen members of a commission appointed by Governor George Ryan of Illinois to recommend reforms of the state's capital-punishment system. In the past twenty-five years, thirteen men who spent time on death row in Illinois have been exonerated, three of them in 1999. Governor Ryan declared a moratorium on executions in January, 2000, and five weeks later announced the formation of our commission. We were a diverse group: two sitting prosecutors; two sitting public defenders; a former Chief Judge of the Federal District Court; a former U.S. senator; three women; four members of racial minorities; prominent Democrats and Republicans. Twelve of us were lawyers, nine with experience as defense attorneys and eleven—including William Martin, who won a capital conviction against the mass murderer Richard Speck, in 1967—with prosecutorial backgrounds. Roberto Ramírez, a Mexican-American immigrant who built a successful janitorial business, knew violent death at first hand. His father was murdered, and his grandfather shot and killed the murderer. Governor Ryan gave us only one instruction. We were to determine what reforms, if any, would make application of the death penalty in Illinois fair, just, and accurate. In March, 2000, during the press conference at which members of the commission were introduced, we were asked who among us opposed capital punishment. Four people raised their hands. I was not one of them.

For a long time, I referred to myself as a death-penalty agnostic, although in the early seventies, when I was a student, I was reflexively against capital punishment. When I was an assistant U.S. attorney, from 1978 to 1986, there was no federal death penalty. The Supreme Court declared capital-punishment statutes unconstitutional in 1972, and although the Court changed its mind in 1976, the death penalty did not become part of federal law again until 1988. However, Illinois had reinstated capital punishment in the mid-seventies, and occasionally my colleagues became involved in state-court murder prosecutions. In 1984, when my oldest friend in the office, Jeremy Margolis, secured a capital sentence against a two-time murderer named Hector Reuben Sanchez, I congratulated him. I wasn't sure what I might do as a legislator, but I had come to accept that some people are incorrigibly evil and I knew that I could follow the will of the community in dealing with them, just as I routinely accepted the wisdom of the RICO statute and the mail-fraud and extortion laws it was my job to enforce.
My first direct encounter with a capital prosecution came in 1991. I was in private practice by then and had published two successful novels, which allowed me to donate much of my time as a lawyer to pro-bono work. One of the cases I was asked to take on was the appeal of Alejandro (Alex) Hernandez, who had been convicted of a notorious kidnapping, rape, and murder. In February, 1983, a ten-year-old girl, Jeanine Nicarico, was abducted from her home in a suburb of Chicago, in DuPage County. Two days later, Jeanine's corpse, clad only in a nightshirt, was found by hikers in a nearby nature preserve. She had been blindfolded, sexually assaulted several times, and then killed by repeated blows to the head. More than forty law-enforcement officers formed a task force to hunt down the killer, but by early 1984 the case had not been solved, and a heated primary campaign was under way for the job of state's attorney in DuPage County. A few days before the election, three men—Alex Hernandez, Rolando Cruz, and Stephen Buckley—were indicted.
The incumbent lost the election anyway, to a local lawyer, Jim Ryan, who took the case to trial in January, 1985. (Ryan later became the attorney general of Illinois, a position he is about to relinquish.) The jury deadlocked on Buckley, but both Hernandez and Cruz were convicted and sentenced to death. There was no physical evidence against either of them—no blood, semen, fingerprints, or other forensic proof. The state's case consisted solely of each defendant's statements, a contradictory maze of mutual accusations and demonstrable falsehoods. By the time the case reached me, seven years after the men were arrested, the charges against Buckley had been dropped and the Illinois Supreme Court had reversed the original convictions of Hernandez and Cruz and ordered separate retrials. In 1990, Cruz was condemned to death for a second time. Hernandez's second trial ended with a hung jury, but at a third trial, in 1991, he was convicted and sentenced to eighty years in prison.
Hernandez's attorneys made a straightforward pitch to me: their client, who has an I.Q. of about 75, was innocent. I didn't believe it. And, even if it was true, I couldn't envision persuading a court to overturn the conviction a second time. Illinois elects its state-court judges, and this was a celebrated case: "the case that broke Chicago's heart" was how it was sometimes referred to in the press. Nevertheless, I read the brief that Lawrence Marshall, a professor of law at Northwestern University, had filed in behalf of Cruz, and studied the transcripts of Hernandez's trials. After that, there was no question in my mind. Alex Hernandez was innocent.
In June, 1985, another little girl, Melissa Ackerman, had been abducted and murdered in northern Illinois. Like Jeanine Nicarico, she was kidnapped in broad daylight, sexually violated, and killed in a wooded area. A man named Brian Dugan was arrested for the Ackerman murder, and, in the course of negotiating for a life sentence, he admitted that he had raped and killed Jeanine Nicarico as well.
The Illinois State Police investigated Dugan's admissions about the Nicarico murder and accumulated a mass of corroborating detail. Dugan was not at work the day the girl disappeared, and a church secretary, working a few blocks from the Nicarico home, recalled a conversation with him. A tire print found where Jeanine's body was deposited matched the tires that had been on Dugan's car. He knew many details about the crime that had never been publicly revealed, including information about the interior of the Nicarico home and the blindfold applied to Jeanine.
Nevertheless, the DuPage County prosecutors refused to accept Dugan's confession. Even after Cruz's and Hernandez's second convictions were overturned in the separate appeals that Larry Marshall and I argued, and notwithstanding a series of DNA tests that excluded Cruz and Hernandez as Jeanine Nicarico's sexual assailant, while pointing directly at Dugan, the prosecutors pursued the cases. It was only after Cruz was acquitted in a third trial, late in 1995, that both men were finally freed.

Capital punishment is supposed to be applied only to the most heinous crimes, but it is precisely those cases which, because of the strong feelings of repugnance they evoke, most thoroughly challenge the detached judgment of all participants in the legal process—police, prosecutors, judges, and juries. The innocent are often particularly at risk. Most defendants charged with capital crimes avoid the death penalty by reaching a plea bargain, a process that someone who is innocent is naturally reluctant to submit to. Innocent people tend to insist on a trial, and when they get it the jury does not include anyone who will refuse on principle to impose a death sentence. Such people are barred from juries in capital cases by a Supreme Court decision, Witherspoon v. Illinois, that, some scholars believe, makes the juries more conviction-prone. In Alex Hernandez's third trial, the evidence against him was so scant that the DuPage County state's attorney's office sought an outside legal opinion to determine whether it could get the case over the bare legal threshold required to go to a jury. Hernandez was convicted anyway, although the trial judge refused to impose a death sentence, because of the paucity of evidence.
A frightened public demanding results in the aftermath of a ghastly crime also places predictable pressures on prosecutors and police, which can sometimes lead to questionable conduct. Confronted with the evidence of Brian Dugan's guilt, the prosecutors in Hernandez's second trial had tried to suggest that he and Dugan could have committed the crime together, even though there was no proof that the men knew each other. Throughout the state's case, the prosecutors emphasized a pair of shoe prints found behind the Nicarico home, where a would-be burglar—i.e., Hernandez—could have looked through a window. Following testimony that Hernandez's shoe size was about 7, a police expert testified that the shoe prints were "about size 6." Until he was directly cross-examined, the expert did not mention that he was referring to a woman's size 6, or that he had identified the tread on one of the prints as coming from a woman's shoe, a fact he'd shared with the prosecutor, who somehow failed to inform the defense.
This kind of overreaching by the prosecution occurred frequently. A special grand jury was convened after Cruz and Hernandez were freed. Three former prosecutors and four DuPage County police officers were indicted on various counts, including conspiring to obstruct justice. They were tried and—as is often the case when lawenforcement officers are charged with overzealous execution of their duties—acquitted, although the county subsequently reached a multimillion-dollar settlement in a civil suit brought by Hernandez, Cruz, and their onetime co-defendant, Stephen Buckley. Despite assertions by DuPage County prosecutors that Jeanine Nicarico's killer deserves to die, Brian Dugan has never been charged with her murder, although Joseph Birkett, the state's attorney for the county, admitted in November that new DNA tests prove Dugan's role with "scientific certainty." In the past, Birkett had celebrated the acquittal of his colleagues on charges of conspiring to obstruct justice and had attacked the special prosecutor who'd brought the charges. He continues to make public statements suggesting that Cruz and Hernandez might be guilty. An ultimately unsuccessful attempt was made to demote the judge who acquitted Cruz, and last year, when the judge resigned from the bench, he had to pay for his own going-away party. In the meantime, the prosecutor who tried to incriminate Alex Hernandez with the print from a woman's shoe is now Chief Judge in DuPage County.

If these are the perils of the system, why have a death penalty? Many people would answer that executions deter others from committing murder, but I found no evidence that convinced me. For example, Illinois, which has a death penalty, has a higher murder rate than the neighboring state of Michigan, which has no capital punishment but roughly the same racial makeup, income levels, and population distribution between cities and rural areas. In fact, in the last decade the murder rate in states without the death penalty has remained consistently lower than in the states that have had executions. Surveys of criminologists and police chiefs show that substantial majorities of both groups doubt that the death penalty significantly reduces the number of homicides.
Another argument—that the death penalty saves money, because it avoids the expense of lifetime incarceration—doesn't hold up, either, when you factor in the staggering costs of capital litigation. In the United States in 2000, the average period between conviction and execution was eleven and a half years, with lawyers and courts spewing out briefs and decisions all that time.
The case for capital punishment that seemed strongest to me came from the people who claim the most direct benefit from an execution: the families and friends of murder victims. The commission heard from survivors in public hearings and in private sessions, and I learned a great deal in these meetings. Death brought on by a random element like disease or a tornado is easier for survivors to accept than the loss of a loved one through the conscious will of another human being. It was not clear to me at first what survivors hoped to gain from the death of a murderer, but certain themes emerged. Dora Larson has been a victims'-rights advocate for nearly twenty years. In 1979, her ten-year-old daughter was kidnapped, raped, and strangled by a fifteen-year-old boy who then buried her in a grave he had dug three days earlier. "Our biggest fear is that someday our child's or loved one's killer will be released," she told the commission. "We want these people off the streets so that others might be safe." A sentence of life without parole should guarantee that the defendant would never repeat his crime, but Mrs. Larson pointed out several ways in which a life sentence poses a far greater emotional burden than an execution. Because her daughter's killer was under eighteen, he was ineligible for the death penalty. "When I was told life, I thought it was life," Larson said to us. "Then I get a letter saying our killer has petitioned the governor for release."
Victims' families talk a lot about "closure," an end to the legal process that will allow them to come to final terms with their grief. Mrs. Larson and others told us that families frequently find the execution of their lost loved one's killer a meaningful emotional landmark. A number of family members of the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing expressed those sentiments after they watched Timothy McVeigh die. The justice the survivors seek is the one embedded in the concept of restitution: the criminal ought not to end up better off than his victim. But the national victims'-rights movement is so powerful that victims have become virtual proprietors of the capital system, leading to troubling inconsistencies. For instance, DuPage County has long supported the Nicarico family's adamant wish for a death sentence for Jeanine's killer, but the virtually identical murder of Melissa Ackerman resulted in a life term with no possibility of parole for Brian Dugan, because Melissa's parents preferred a quick resolution. It makes no more sense to let victims rule the capital process than it would to decide what will be built on the World Trade Center site solely according to the desires of the survivors of those killed on September 11th. In a democracy, no minority, even people whose losses scour our hearts, should be entitled to speak for us all.

Governor Ryan's commission didn't spend much time on philosophical debates, but those who favored capital punishment tended to make one argument again and again: sometimes a crime is so horrible that killing its perpetrator is the only just response. I've always thought death-penalty proponents have a point when they say that it denigrates the profound indignity of murder to punish it in the same fashion as other crimes. These days, you can get life in California for your third felony, even if it's swiping a few videotapes from a Kmart. Does it vindicate our shared values if the most immoral act imaginable, the unjustified killing of another human being, is treated the same way? The issue is not revenge or retribution, exactly, so much as moral order. When everything is said and done, I suspect that this notion of moral proportion—ultimate punishment for ultimate evil—is the reason most Americans continue to support capital punishment.
This places an enormous burden of precision on the justice system, however. If we execute the innocent or the undeserving, then we have undermined, not reinforced, our sense of moral proportion. The prosecution of Alex Hernandez demonstrated to me the risks to the innocent. A case I took on later gave me experience with the problematic nature of who among the guilty gets selected for execution. One afternoon, I had assembled a group of young lawyers in my office to discuss pro-bono death-penalty work when, by pure coincidence, I found a letter in my in-box from a man, Christopher Thomas, who said he'd been convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, even though none of the four eyewitnesses to the crime who testified had identified him. We investigated and found that the letter was accurate—in a sense. None of the eyewitnesses had identified Thomas. However, he had two accomplices, both of whom had turned against him, and Thomas had subsequently confessed three different times, the last occasion on videotape.
According to the various accounts, Chris Thomas—who is black, and was twenty-one at the time of the crime—and his two pals had run out of gas behind a strip mall in Waukegan, Illinois. They were all stoned, and they hatched a plan to roll somebody for money. Rafael Gasgonia, a thirty-nine-year-old Filipino immigrant, was unfortunate enough to step out for a smoke behind the photo shop where he worked as a delivery driver. The three men accosted him. Thomas pointed a gun at his head, and when a struggle broke out Thomas fired once, killing Gasgonia instantly.
I was drawn to Chris Thomas's case because I couldn't understand how a parking-lot stickup gone bad had ended in a death sentence. But after we studied the record, it seemed clear to us that Thomas, like a lot of other defendants, was on death row essentially for the crime of having the wrong lawyers. He had been defended by two attorneys under contract to the Lake County public defender's office. They were each paid thirty thousand dollars a year to defend a hundred and three cases, about three hundred dollars per case. By contract, one assignment had to be a capital case. The fiscal year was nearly over, and neither of the contract lawyers had done his capital work, so they were assigned to Thomas's case together. One of them had no experience of any kind in death-penalty cases; the other had once been standby counsel for a man who was defending himself.
In court, we characterized Thomas's defense as all you would expect for six hundred dollars. His lawyers seemed to regard the case as a clear loser at trial and, given the impulsive nature of the crime, virtually certain to result in a sentence other than death. They did a scanty investigation of Thomas's background for the sentencing hearing, an effort that was hindered by the fact that the chief mitigation witness, Thomas's aunt, who was the closest thing to an enduring parental figure in his life, had herself been prosecuted on a drug charge by one of the lawyers during his years as an assistant state's attorney. As a result, Thomas's aunt distrusted the lawyers, and, under her influence, Chris soon did as well. He felt screwed around already, since he had confessed to the crime and expressed remorse, and had been rewarded by being put on trial for his life. At the sentencing hearing, Thomas took the stand and denied that he was guilty, notwithstanding his many prior confessions. The presiding judge, who had never before sentenced anybody to death, gave Thomas the death penalty.
In Illinois, some of this could not happen now. The Capital Litigation Trust Fund has been established to pay for an adequate defense, and the state Supreme Court created a Capital Litigation trial bar, which requires lawyers who represent someone facing the death penalty to be experienced in capital cases. Nonetheless, looking over the opinions in the roughly two hundred and seventy capital appeals in Illinois, I was struck again and again by the wide variation in the seriousness of the crimes. There were many monstrous offenses, but also a number of garden-variety murders. And the feeling that the system is an unguided ship is only heightened when one examines the first-degree homicides that have resulted in sentences other than death. Thomas was on death row, but others from Lake County—a man who had knocked a friend unconscious and placed him on the tracks in front of an oncoming train, for instance, and a mother who had fed acid to her baby—had escaped it.
The inevitable disparities between individual cases are often enhanced by social factors, like race, which plays a role that is not always well understood. The commission authorized a study that showed that in Illinois, you are more likely to receive the death penalty if you are white—two and a half times as likely. One possible reason is that in a racially divided society whites tend to associate with, and thus to murder, other whites. And choosing a white victim makes a murderer three and a half times as likely to be punished by a death sentence as if he'd killed someone who was black. (At least in Illinois, blacks and whites who murdered whites were given a death sentence at essentially the same rate, which has not always been true in other places.)
Geography also matters in Illinois. You are five times as likely to get a death sentence for first-degree murder in a rural area as you are in Cook County, which includes Chicago. Gender seems to count, too. Capital punishment for slaying a woman is imposed at three and half times the rate for murdering a man. When you add in all the uncontrollable variables—who the prosecutor and the defense lawyer are, the nature of the judge and the jury, the characteristics of the victim, the place of the crime—the results reflect anything but a clearly proportionate morality.
And execution, of course, ends any chance that a defendant will acknowledge the claims of the morality we seek to enforce. More than three years after my colleagues and I read Chris Thomas's letter, a court in Lake County resentenced him to a hundred years in prison, meaning that, with good behavior, he could be released when he is seventy-one. He wept in court and apologized to the Gasgonia family for what he had done.

Supporters of capital punishment in Illinois, particularly those in law enforcement, often use Henry Brisbon as their trump card. Get rid of the death penalty, they say, and what do you do about the likes of Henry?
On the night of June 3, 1973, Brisbon and three "rap partners" (his term) forced several cars off I-57, an interstate highway south of Chicago. Brisbon made a woman in one of the cars disrobe, and then he discharged a shotgun in her vagina. He compelled a young couple to lie down in a field together, instructed them to "make this your last kiss," and shot both of them in the back. His role in these crimes was uncovered only years later, when he confessed to an inmate working as a law librarian in the penitentiary where he was serving a stretch for rape and armed robbery. Because the I-57 killings occurred shortly after the Supreme Court declared capital punishment unconstitutional, Brisbon was not eligible for the death penalty. He was given a sentence of one thousand to three thousand years in prison, probably the longest term ever imposed in Illinois.
In October, 1978, eleven months after the sentencing, Brisbon murdered again. He placed a homemade knife to the throat of a guard to subdue him, then went with several inmates to the cell of another prisoner and stabbed him repeatedly. By the time Brisbon was tried again, in early 1982, Illinois had restored capital punishment, and he was sentenced to death. The evidence in his sentencing hearings included proof of yet another murder Brisbon had allegedly committed prior to his imprisonment, when he placed a shotgun against the face of a store clerk and blew him away. He had accumulated more than two hundred disciplinary violations while he was incarcerated, and had played a major role in the violent takeover of Stateville prison, in September, 1979. Predictably, the death sentence did not markedly improve Brisbon's conduct. In the years since he was first condemned, he has been accused of a number of serious assaults on guards, including a stabbing, and he severely injured another inmate when he threw a thirty-pound weight against his skull.
Brisbon is now held at the Tamms Correctional Center, a "super-max" facility that houses more than two hundred and fifty men culled from an Illinois prison population of almost forty-five thousand. Generally speaking, Tamms inmates are either gang leaders or men with intractable discipline problems. I wanted to visit Tamms, hoping that it would tell me whether it is possible to incapacitate people like Brisbon, who are clearly prone to murder again if given the opportunity.
Tamms is situated near the southernmost point of Illinois, farther south than parts of Kentucky. The Mississippi, a wide body of cloacal brown, floods the nearby lowlands, creating a region of green marshes along orange sandstone bluffs. Tamms stands at the foot of one of those stone outcroppings, on a vast, savannalike grassland. The terms of confinement are grim. Inmates are permitted no physical contact with other human beings. Each prisoner is held twenty-three hours a day inside a seven-by-twelve-foot block of preformed concrete that has a single window to the outside, roughly forty-two by eighteen inches, segmented by a lateral steel bar. The cell contains a stainless-steel fixture housing a toilet bowl and a sink and a concrete pallet over which a foam mattress is laid. The front of the cell has a panel of punch-plate steel pierced by a network of half-inch circles, almost like bullet holes, that permit conversation but prevent the kind of mayhem possible when prisoners can get their hands through the bars. Once a day, an inmate's door is opened by remote control, and he walks down a corridor of cells to an outdoor area, twelve by twenty-eight feet, surrounded by thirteen-foot-high concrete walls, with a roof over half of it for shelter from the elements. For an hour, a prisoner may exercise or just breathe fresh air. Showers are permitted on a similar remote-control basis, for twenty minutes, several times a week.
In part because the facility is not full, incarceration in Tamms costs about two and a half times as much as the approximately twenty thousand dollars a year that is ordinarily spent on an inmate in Illinois, but the facility has a remarkable record of success in reducing disciplinary infractions and assaults. George Welborn, a tall, lean man with a full head of graying hair, a mustache, and dark, thoughtful eyes, was the warden of Tamms when I visited. I talked to him for much of the day, and toward the end asked if he really believed that he could keep Brisbon from killing again. Welborn, who speaks with a southern-Illinois twang, was an assistant warden at Stateville when Brisbon led the inmate uprising there, and he testified against him in the proceedings that resulted in his death sentence. He took his time with my question, but answered, guardedly, "Yes."
I was permitted to meet Brisbon, speaking with him through the punch-plate from the corridor in front of his cell. He is a solidly built African-American man of medium height, somewhat bookish-looking, with heavy glasses. He seemed quick-witted and amiable, and greatly amused by himself. He had read all about the commission, and he displayed a letter in which, many years ago, he had suggested a moratorium on executions. He had some savvy predictions about the political impediments to many potential reforms of the capital system.
"Henry is a special case," Welborn said to me later, when we spoke on the phone. "I would be foolish to say I can guarantee he won't kill anyone again. I can imagine situations, God forbid . . . But the chances are minimized here." Still, Welborn emphasized, with Brisbon there would never be any guarantees.

I had another reason for wanting to visit Tamms. Illinois's execution chamber is now situated there. Unused for more than two years because of Governor Ryan's moratorium, it remains a solemn spot, with the sterile feel of an operating theatre in a hospital. The execution gurney, where the lethal injection is administered, is covered by a crisp sheet and might even be mistaken for an examining table except for the arm paddles that extend from it and the crisscrossing leather restraints that strike a particularly odd note in the world of Tamms, where virtually everything else is of steel, concrete, or plastic.
Several years ago, I attended a luncheon where Sister Helen Prejean, the author of "Dead Man Walking," delivered the keynote address. The daughter of a prominent lawyer, Sister Helen is a powerful orator. Inveighing against the death penalty, she looked at the audience and repeated one of her favorite arguments: "If you really believe in the death penalty, ask yourself if you're willing to inject the fatal poison." I thought of Sister Helen when I stood in the death chamber at Tamms. I felt the horror of the coolly contemplated ending of the life of another human being in the name of the law. But if John Wayne Gacy, the mass murderer who tortured and killed thirty-three young men, had been on that gurney, I could, as Sister Helen would have it, have pushed the button. I don't think the death penalty is the product of an alien morality, and I respect the right of a majority of my fellow-citizens to decide that it ought to be imposed on the most horrific crimes.

The members of the commission knew that capital punishment would not be abolished in Illinois anytime soon. Accordingly, our formal recommendations, many of which were made unanimously, ran to matters of reform. Principal among them was lowering the risks of convicting the innocent. Several of the thirteen men who had been on death row and were then exonerated had made dubious confessions, which appeared to have been coerced or even invented. We recommended that all interrogations of suspects in capital cases be videotaped. We also proposed altering lineup procedures, since eyewitness testimony has proved to be far less trustworthy than I ever thought while I was a prosecutor. We urged that courts provide pretrial hearings to determine the reliability of jailhouse snitches, who have surfaced often in Illinois's capital cases, testifying to supposed confessions in exchange for lightened sentences.
To reduce the seeming randomness with which some defendants appear to end up on death row, we proposed that the twenty eligibility criteria for capital punishment in Illinois be trimmed to five: multiple murders, murder of a police officer or firefighter, murder in a prison, murder aimed at hindering the justice system, and murder involving torture. Murders committed in the course of another felony, the eligibility factor used in Christopher Thomas's case, would be eliminated. And we urged the creation of a statewide oversight body to attempt to bring more uniformity to the selection of death-penalty cases.
To insure that the capital system is something other than an endless maze for survivors, we recommended guaranteed sentences of life with no parole when eligible cases don't result in the death penalty. And we also outlined reforms aimed at expediting the post-conviction review and clemency processes.
Yet our proposals sidestepped the ultimate question. One fall day, Paul Simon, the former U.S. senator who was one of the commission's chairs and is a longtime foe of the death penalty, forced us to vote on whether Illinois should have a death penalty at all. The vote was an expression of sentiment, not a formal recommendation. What was our best advice to our fellow-citizens, political realities aside? By a narrow majority, we agreed that capital punishment should not be an option.
I admit that I am still attracted to a death penalty that would be applied to horrendous crimes, or that would provide absolute certainty that the likes of Henry Brisbon would never again satisfy their cruel appetites. But if death is available as a punishment, the furious heat of grief and rage that these crimes inspire will inevitably short-circuit any capital system. Now and then, we will execute someone who is innocent, while the fundamental equality of each survivor's loss creates an inevitable emotional momentum to expand the categories for death-penalty eligibility. Like many others who have wrestled with capital punishment, I have changed my mind often, driven back and forth by the errors each position seems to invite. Yet after two years of deliberation, I seem to have finally come to rest. When Paul Simon asked whether Illinois should have a death penalty, I voted no. 

To Guarantee Universal Coverage, Require It
By TED HALSTEAD

WASHINGTON — Among President Bush's top priorities, he said in the State of the Union address, is "high quality, affordable health care for all Americans." Yet he offered precious few specifics. With nearly three million Americans losing their health insurance in the last two years alone and health care costs rising at the highest rate in a decade, America needs a bold plan.
The most promising solution to America's health care crisis is mandatory insurance. For the same reasons most states require drivers to carry car insurance, the federal government should require all Americans to purchase basic health insurance. Those who cannot afford the full cost should receive public subsidies. Mandatory self-insurance would provide fully portable coverage to all Americans, while lowering insurance costs, raising the quality of care, maintaining a private insurance market and offering citizens more choice.
The grand bargain underlying compulsory health insurance would be universal coverage in exchange for universal responsibility. Of the 41 million Americans without health insurance, a full two-thirds are below the age of 35. Mandating tens of millions of young and relatively healthy Americans to join the insurance risk pool would drive down the costs for everyone. Insured patients are also less likely to rely on expensive hospital emergency rooms for their basic medical care.
Most of the uninsured are members of the middle class; a third have annual incomes of more than $50,000. Requiring them to devote up to a certain percentage of their income to purchasing basic coverage would be imposing a significant, though not ruinous, financial burden — but they themselves would be the primary beneficiaries. Not only would they receive better care, with its obvious benefits (regular checkups and peace of mind, for example), but their premiums would be significantly lower than those available to them now.
The new system would also be an improvement for Americans who receive health insurance from their employers. They would be able to select their own insurance policy and level of coverage from among private providers, instead of being limited to the one selected by their employer. They would also be able to keep the policy and doctors of their choice as they move from job to job. Employers, meanwhile, would not stop paying for coverage — they would simply contribute to the policy of their employee's choosing. After all, employer-subsidized health insurance is voluntary now, and there is little reason to believe that employers would suddenly stop providing it.
Mandatory self-insurance would also increase the quality of care. Today, most Americans change health insurers when they change jobs: average tenure with any given insurer is a mere couple of years. By enabling citizens to stay with a single insurer for life, mandatory self-insurance would increase insurers' incentives to invest in disease prevention and long-term preventive care.
Making mandatory self-insurance work would require new regulations and changes in our health care framework. For instance, America would no longer need to maintain a separate Medicaid system for the very poor. Insurers would have to accept all comers and be prevented from discriminating on the basis of pre-existing conditions. Ensuring that all citizens self-insure need not be difficult; those unable to prove that they had done so on their annual tax form could be enrolled in a default private plan by the government, and either billed or subsidized accordingly.
A policy of mandatory health insurance defies the usual political spectrum. Its universalist dimension should appeal to the left, while its market-based orientation should appeal to the right. The interesting question is who will be first to lay claim to this idea: President Bush or one of the Democratic presidential candidates. 

Ted Halstead, president of the New America Foundation, is co-author of "The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/opinion/31HALS.html NYT 1/31/03
THE OIL WEAPON
Issue of 2003-02-10
Posted 2003-02-03
On October 14, 1973, in one of the biggest tank battles in history, Israeli forces routed an invading Egyptian Army, destroying about two hundred and fifty tanks and losing just twenty-five. Two days later, the Israelis—who had been aided by an American airlift of military supplies—crossed over the Suez Canal and into Egypt. In retaliation, the Arab members of OPEC declared an oil embargo against the United States, ordering a series of production cutbacks and royalty increases that tripled the price of oil. Long gas lines became commonplace and the U.S. economy fell into a recession. In a nod to austerity, Richard Nixon decreed that the national Christmas tree would go unlit.
Thirty years later, we can't see past that darkened tree. The embargo, which lasted only a few months, still shapes the way we think about the politics and economics of oil. Ever since, the spectre of Arab countries using oil as a political weapon has haunted discussions of the Middle East and the global petroleum market, and has kept U.S. policymakers obsessed with "energy security" (which in practice has meant sucking up to the Saudis) and with "energy independence" from what has come to be known, in the Times and elsewhere, as "the axis of oil." Fear of the oil weapon leads commentators to fret over how the Arab states will react to President Bush's ambitious plans for the Middle East, even as it inspires some advocates of those plans to declare that they will bring, as Bush's former speechwriter David Frum put it in his recent memoir, "new prosperity to us all, by securing the world's largest pool of oil." In the popular imagination, oil remains what the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S. called it in 1973: "high-octane political fuel."
If so, it's fuel that's hard to burn. For all the Arab scimitar-rattling and Western hand-wringing, in the past three decades oil has been a remarkably feckless weapon. The Saudis have used threats to try to shape U.S. foreign policy, but ever since the Iranian revolution they've been the ones who have consistently stepped up production to fill the shortfalls created by political turmoil elsewhere (as they are doing now, in response to the crisis in Venezuela). And although Iran's mullahs may think of the U.S. as the Great Satan, that hasn't kept them from selling billions of gallons of oil in the world market, thereby helping to keep American gas prices down. Even Saddam Hussein (with the exception of a fruitless embargo last April to protest Israel's Palestine policy) has kept pumping as much oil as he can, or, rather, as much as the U.N. will allow.
Such bounteousness has nothing to do with benevolence and everything to do with necessity. The oil states have accommodated themselves to the new world of oil, in which OPEC is less powerful and the Western economies are less vulnerable than they were in the nineteen-seventies. Thirty years ago, OPEC controlled fifty-five per cent of the world market. Today, OPEC controls less than forty per cent, thanks to the rise in production in places like Canada, Mexico, and the North Sea. Western countries have more than a billion barrels of oil in strategic reserves. And although the United States is by far the world's biggest consumer of oil, it uses much less oil per dollar of G.D.P. than it did thirty years ago, all those Cadillac Escalades notwithstanding.
If the Arab states slashed oil production to protest U.S. policies, it would cause us pain. But it would hurt them more. Forty per cent of Saudi Arabia's G.D.P. comes from oil revenues, and other Persian Gulf economies are similarly dependent. The oil boom of the seventies inflated the standard of living in much of the Arab world and created expectations that could be fulfilled only by a continued flow of petrodollars. In 1973, the production cutbacks didn't actually cost the Arab states anything—they sold less oil, but at a much higher price. An extended embargo today, though, would cost them tens of billions of dollars. (After all, if they could make bigger profits in the long run by cutting production, they would have done so yesterday.) Without those petrodollars, they'd fall to pieces.
As for a targeted embargo—where the Arabs would sell to everyone but the U.S.—it wouldn't work, because one barrel of oil is pretty much like any other. If the Arabs won't sell to the U.S., someone else will—three of America's four biggest suppliers are non-Arab countries. And as long as OPEC is selling to anyone it will hold down the price for everyone. Essentially, there is one global market for oil.
The Arab states, in other words, need us more than we need them. We are their best customer. That's why the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said recently, "Oil isn't a weapon like a cannon or a tank," and why the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, last spring urged oil-producing countries to "proclaim before the world that we respect the consumer and we want to satisfy his needs and the stability of his economy."
It may sound strange to hear an Arab leader talk like the C.E.O. of Wal-Mart—to think of OPEC states as purveyors of a commodity, rather than as hoarders of treasure. But, public posturing aside, that's how they have come to see themselves. In Washington, though, this hasn't sunk in. Americans, who usually understand that economic self-interest tends to trump ideology, have assumed that in the Middle East the opposite holds true, even as various despots and mullahs have kept pumping oil regardless of what we do to them or what they think of us. U.S. policymakers still seem to be afraid of the oil weapon, seeing it as a reason for acting with caution (when it comes to pushing for change in Saudi Arabia) or aggression (when it comes to pushing for change in Iraq). By allowing this fear to shape our policy, we've given oil a power it shouldn't have.
— James Surowiecki
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030210ta_talk_surowiecki 
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Deer
By CHIP BROWN

The Strange and the Beautiful

It takes a while to figure out why Dr. Mark Mahowald's grainy sleep-lab videos are so spooky. One immediate reason is the phenomena on the footage -- a class of disorders called ''parasomnias,'' which are defined as unwanted and involuntary behaviors during sleep and are by definition occult, because they appear when most people are unable to witness them. But even the scientists who stay up late by profession never quite get used to what they see. Mahowald, a neurology professor at the University of Minnesota and director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center, likes to say to his students, ''We study the strange and the beautiful.''
To judge from the tapes, that's the understatement of the semester. 
Here's a bearded elder man bolting up at 4:30 a.m. He clutches his left leg, waves his right arm and brays at the top of his lungs -- "HO! HO! HO!" -- dementedly jolly cries that also evoke something bestial and wounded. In the morning he remembers nothing of this ''confusional arousal'' triggered by obstructive sleep apnea, a condition in which a constriction of the throat causes you to gasp for breath. Inevitably the man came to be known at the lab as Santa Claus. Mahowald said that when the patient saw himself on tape he was ''horrified'' but finally understood why he'd been kicked out of so many hotels. 
Here's a fat, frizzy-haired woman in bed grinding her teeth. The sound is like a door hinge in a haunted house. Her left hand fumbles for a snack; she starts to eat, with no conscious control over her actions. 
Here are people in the midst of ''partial'' arousals who spring from bed and rip off the electrodes glued to their heads, removing patches of their scalps as well; people who box the air, flail at imaginary snakes, twitch, jerk, groan, rub their genitals, bloody their hands on nightstands or rock and tremble like bobble-head dolls. People who by day are wry, levelheaded paragons of mental health but who at night find themselves locked in life-and-death struggles with intruders. 
Mel Abel, for instance. He's a droll, mild-mannered man who grew up on a farm in Minnesota, owned a tavern for a while and sold real estate. A taped snippet of one of his nights in the sleep lab is part of a parasomnia training video. At 4:24 a.m., Mel begins sleep-talking: ''Quit using the goddamn bowl for banging like that -- quit it now! Get the hell out of here! Go on! That's about four times this morning that I have told you. I don't know if you're that deaf or that dumb, which . . . goddamn continuously. . . . What the hell are you looking for, a walleye?'' 
For sure, some of these spectacles are hilarious. It's hard not to laugh when a sane Midwesterner who doesn't have a cat sits on the edge of his bed asleep, saying, ''Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.'' But it's not so funny if you are one of the automatons eating raw bacon and cigarettes. Some parasomnia cases have the parameters of Greek tragedy. Mel Abel's eyes brim with tears when he tells how criminally close he came to harming his wife, Harriet. He was struggling with a deer whose neck he was trying to snap when he discovered he was actually home in bed with his hands on Harriet's head and chin. Harriet woke him up, hollering, ''Mel, what in the world are you trying to do?'' 
These after-hours manifestations of the strange and beautiful undermine all our noonday notions of who we are and what we can command. Suddenly it's easy to understand what spawned the lore of demons and succubi, those ''old hags'' from whom the word nightmare is derived, and the countless other psychoreligious confabulations dreamed up over the centuries since Plato declared that ''in all of us, even good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature which peers out in sleep.'' 
Our ideas about ourselves are constantly evolving, but the pace of the revisions lately has been accelerated by phenomenal advances in both neuroscience and sleep medicine, which is one of the youngest sciences. ''We are at the dawn of the golden age of sleep research,'' says David Dinges, chief of the division of sleep and chronobiology in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. ''The field is moving so fast scientifically that few researchers can even take the time to write a book.'' 
New data about parasomnias are emerging in the context of a ''folk psychology'' that has been shaped by a century of Freudian opinion. If we now conceive of demons and their ilk as repressed conflicts and developmental traumas and accept as axiomatic that the self is not limited to what we are strictly conscious of even when fully awake, we also suppose our behaviors are pregnant with hidden meanings and that our psyches speak in codes only $200-an-hour masterminds can crack. We suppose hidden truths are waiting to surface when the guard of waking is dropped. 
Parasomnias are interesting for the ways they undercut these contentions -- for what they imply about the scope and nature of the self. They point toward a novel model of the mind that envisions waking, sleeping and dreaming as distinct neurodynamic states that lie along a continuum and are separated by imperfect, sometimes porous boundaries. States can get ''dissociated'' or mixed together in the way script from one program can hang up in another when you're shifting between the windows of a buggy computer. If this ''state dissociation'' model proposes a brave new world shorn of some of our most cozy truisms, it also raises those questions that inevitably trail after radical revisions: that's to say, who are we now under these strange new terms, and how should we live? 

Drama Queens

It's probably safe to say that as long as people have been sleeping they have been having problems sleeping, but the consensus now is that things have never been worse. Electric lights, night shifts, double espressos, after-dark distractions, even the archetype of the macho workaholic have combined to murder sleep. Millions of Americans have what is called ''sleep debt,'' which preliminary studies indicate may lead to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and depression, among other troubles. 
For about 40 million Americans, sleeping woes can be linked to at least one of the 84 official sleep disorders, the most common of which are chronic insomnia and obstructive sleep apnea. People with sleep apnea can wake up hundreds of times a night and not know it. On the other hand, parasomnias, which account for about 10 percent of sleep disorders, are the drama queens of the night, known if not to the afflicted players (who are by definition asleep) then certainly to their boggled bed partners. They are generally divided into two categories that reflect the now canonical states of the sleeping brain -- those that occur in Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep and those that arise from non-REM (NREM) sleep. 
The most common NREM parasomnias, sleepwalking and sleep terrors, are often triggered by so-called partial or confusional arousals from the deepest stages of sleep. Some stimulus like a loud noise or a full bladder half-wakes you up, and you have enough awareness to perform fairly complex motor behaviors -- enough to drive a car, say, or turn on a microwave -- but not enough to be considered the agent of your actions by traditional standards. The amnesia characteristic of NREM arousals seems almost incredible in the case of sleep terrors, where people will often bolt up bug-eyed, screaming like actresses in straight-to-video horror movies. It's no wonder that the prevailing opinion until recently was that these disorders signaled some seriously loose screws. 
''We were taught in medical school in the 60's that sleepwalking and sleep terrors in adults were associated with significant underlying psychiatric disease,'' Mahowald told me. ''I actually taught that because that's what the book said. Then we saw a lot of adults with sleepwalking and sleep terrors who were perfectly well wired neurologically and psychiatrically. People just didn't want to believe that a perfectly normal adult could have sleep terrors and sleepwalking.'' 
Sleepwalking and sleep terrors are so common among children between the ages of 4 and 12 that they're considered normal developmental behavior. It's one measure of how culture is imposed on us that what's normal in children is problematic in adults. Often sleepwalkers, or people with some of the other disorders like sleep-talking, sleep-groaning or periodic limb movement disorder, don't seek treatment until they're planning to head off to college or join the Army and are faced with the prospect of exhibiting their embarrassing night life in a dorm or a barracks. 
The first window for REM parasomnias opens with the initial phase of sleep associated with vivid dreams. Rapid Eye Movement sleep could just as easily be named after one of its other features, muscle paralysis, or atonia, which is what prevents you from sitting up in a dream to pet a cat you don't have. The presence of muscle tone is a key to REM behavior disorder, perhaps the most significant of all the parasomnias.
The mystery of the brain's nightly oscillations between REM and NREM is part of the larger enigma of sleep itself. No one really knows why we have to throw ourselves onto a pallet every evening, or why the average person spends about 25 years of his or her life sleeping (or trying to sleep). All that's certain is that sleep is essential for many species of birds and for all mammals, and that evolution seems to have taken pains to keep it in the picture. (Dolphins, for example, would drown if they couldn't stay awake to regulate their respiration, but their brains have evolved the ingenious ability to sleep one hemisphere at a time.)
Much of what is known about parasomnias has been gathered in sleep clinics, the first of which was established only in 1970 at Stanford University. There are now hundreds of clinics in the United States. When an especially baffling parasomnia case appears, doctors sometimes refer patients to top centers like the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center, where Mark Mahowald and his colleague Carlos Schenck have been mapping this esoteric patch of the mind-body problem for more than 20 years. Late last summer Mahowald invited me to visit the Minnesota clinic, and Schenck, a psychiatrist on staff there, offered to introduce me to some of his patients -- a group of Midwesterners who were more intimately acquainted with the strange and beautiful than they'd ever bargained for. 

"Nine Years of Hell"

In 1979, after 33 years of marriage, Rowena Pope thought she knew her husband, Cal, as well as any soul mate could. They lived in a house in a northern suburb of Minneapolis. They had raised six daughters and a son. They had started out ''poor as Job's turkey,'' as Rowena put it, but had worked hard, Cal as a customs broker, and Rowena in jobs at a local newspaper, a law office and the municipal court. She could finish her husband's sentences and start a lot of them, too, because he was a man of few words -- dutiful, undemonstrative, slow to anger, gentle. 
''He's part of that generation of men who came home from World War II, took off the uniform and never said a word about it to anybody, and anybody who did say a word was a blowhard,'' Rowena told me when I visited them at their house. 
One spring night in 1979, asleep in bed, she woke up to find herself under attack. It was Cal, of all people. ''He was violently kicking and pummeling me and carrying on,'' she recalled. ''His feet were just like hammers -- bang! bang! bang! It lasted about a minute but it seemed like forever. He was asleep. I asked him when he woke up, 'What in the world is happening?' And he said, 'I don't know.''' 
She was angry and frightened, but mostly puzzled. 
When he came home from work that night, he said he finally figured out that he had been having a dream and in it, an intruder had come into their bedroom and he was trying to drive him out. 
''That was the beginning of nine years of hell,'' Rowena said. 
Night after night, Cal would kick and shout in his sleep. The episodes began to take a toll on the house, not to mention on Cal's body. He knocked pictures off the wall. A head butt left a crack in a walnut dresser that had belonged to Rowena's mother. He threw a punch that put a crater in the plaster bedside wall. He cracked a toe, and bloodied his knuckles more times than anybody could count. 
The episodes also began to take an emotional toll on Rowena. ''There was never a time when we were free of it,'' she said. ''We turned down invitations to stay overnight at friends' houses. Cal never wanted to travel. At night he would be shouting and cavorting and carrying on. I finally said, 'You have to sleep in another room.' I talked to our family doctor, and he said, 'Oh, it might be something he ate.' People didn't know anything about this.'' 
She thought maybe Cal had post-traumatic stress from the horrors of his experience in the war. What was most exasperating was that Cal didn't think he really had a problem. When he was dreaming he lacked any awareness of being in a dream, and when he would wake up, he had little if any memory of what had happened. Because his sleep was chopped up with so many arousals, he was often exhausted during the day and would come home from work and collapse. 
''I just figured I was working too hard,'' he said. 
''Sometimes he would shout out in his sleep 'No! No! No!''' Rowena said. ''I had never heard him sound so anguished before in my life. It was heart-rending. He's never been in a fight as far as I'm aware of. He was never jealous.'' 
They took all the framed pictures out of the room. They got a bed that was low to the floor and under the carpet laid a double-thick pad to cushion the falls Cal might take. 
A feeling of estrangement crept over their marriage. Cal eventually moved all his clothes and belongings into another room. Sleeping in separate beds was ''abhorrent'' to Rowena, but she felt there was no choice.
Then one afternoon she saw a report on the local TV news about a man who mistook his wife for a deer. It was Mel Abel. Rowena tried to persuade Cal to have an evaluation. He resisted, even though the behavior seemed to be getting worse. She recalled one incident in an account she wrote up: 
''One afternoon while he was napping on the couch as I read a book, he played out a scene more awful than anything I had ever seen or heard. He rolled off the couch and hit the floor. Normally, a fall to the floor would have awakened him. But instead he began roaring like a wounded wild animal. I sat in my chair frozen with fear as I watched the unbelievable scene unfold. He roared, he crouched, he pounced and finally crawled into a space between the couch and the wall, as if in a den or lair. When I was able to speak I shouted to awaken him. He could not believe my description of what had just happened, even though he was surprised to find himself on the floor.'' 
Rowena had finally had enough. She wrote to the Minnesota sleep center and in November 1988 got Cal an appointment with Dr. Schenck. The next month he spent two nights in the sleep lab. The diagnosis was indeed what Mel Abel's had been: REM behavior disorder. 
''It was such a relief to get a diagnosis and treatment,'' Rowena said. ''At the time they had only diagnosed 25 people.'' 
Only two years earlier in the journal Sleep, Mahowald and Schenck had published what would come to be considered one of the seminal papers in the field, formally identifying REM behavior disorder (R.B.D.) as a new parasomnia. R.B.D. mainly affects men over 50 and is characterized clinically by changes in the nature and range of a patient's dreams, as well as by a spectacular loss of the muscle paralysis that prevents most people from acting their dreams out. 
In a way, REM behavior disorder is the mirror image of narcolepsy, the well-known disorder that can cause people to nod out in the middle of a sentence. In narcolepsy, a feature of REM sleep (muscle atonia) intrudes into waking. In REM behavior disorder, a feature of waking (muscle tone) intrudes into REM sleep. A sedative, clonazepam, which works in ways nobody really understands, has been proved an effective treatment for REM behavior disorder. It doesn't restore the muscle paralysis but seems to calm the brain down enough to keep the dreamers in their beds. 
What makes REM behavior disorder so theatrical is not just the dream enactment but also the change in the character of the dreams. They become more like pulp fiction, filled with intruders, obscenities, kicks and uppercuts. Here, you might think, is a psychologically rich parasomnia in which the sleeping mind betrays the unexpurgated feelings hidden behind the mask of civility. 
Apparently not. 
''The R.B.D. behaviors and their associated stereotypic dream changes are the most reflexive by-products of altered brain-stem activity,'' Schenck told me. ''They are behavioral storms coming from the brain stem.'' 
In Schenck and Mahowald's view, what argues for the finding that R.B.D. behavior has little if anything to do with psychodynamic factors are the famous experiments with cats that anticipated the discovery of REM behavior disorder in humans. Michel Jouvet and his colleagues in France in the 1960's made lesions in cat brain stems that prevented muscle atonia. When the cats went into REM sleep, they didn't lie immobilized in the dream world; they scrambled up, arched their backs and acted out all sorts of aggressive automatic behaviors. 
''The categories of behavior seen in REM-behavior-disorder patients are the exact same categories seen in animals,'' Schenck said. ''We see simple jerking and twitching, orientation responses, locomotion and violent behaviors. We don't see feeding, eating, grooming or sexual behavior. Basically, with REM behavior disorder your dream content gets very restricted. Everything is shunted along certain pathways. A lot of people say after treatment, 'I can have my regular dreams again!''' 
One of Schenck and Mahowald's most remarkable findings was that in 65 percent of their male patients over 50 (without a neurological condition), the onset of REM behavior disorder proved to be a harbinger of Parkinson's disease. Some patients actually experienced changes in the content of their dreams months before they began acting them out. In those who developed Parkinson's, symptoms of the disease appeared within 13 years on average from the onset of R.B.D. 
Schenck and Mahowald identified R.B.D., but they were not the first to describe the behavior, as Schenck learned in December 1996, when he flew to Madrid to give some talks to a Spanish neurological society. At dinner one night, two of his colleagues presented him with a gift, a copy of Miguel de Cervantes's epic novel ''Don Quixote,'' published in 1605. A passage was marked on Page 364. Schenck, who speaks Spanish, began to smile as he read Cervantes's lines: ''He was thrusting his sword in all directions, speaking out loud as if he were actually fighting a giant. And the strange thing was that he did not have his eyes open, because he was asleep and dreaming that he was battling the giant. . . . He had stabbed the wine skins so many times, believing that he was stabbing the giant, that the entire room was filled with wine.'' A classic case of R.B.D., described 381 years before the condition was recognized. 
Cal Pope still thrashes in his sleep, but his medication has managed the behavior fairly well for 14 years now, and some good things have come back into his and Rowena's lives -- not everything, but Rowena prefers to count her blessings. After 56 years of marriage, she has the company of her husband again, not that wild beast that was peering out at her from sleep. They go to the movies once a week. Evenings at home they watch the news together, sometimes sharing a bowl of popcorn or ice cream, and then around 10, still a little wary of the night, they head off to separate rooms. 

"Even the Mice Have Left"

Because people have been devising theories about the meaning of dreams for centuries, convinced that dreams are messages from God or postcards from the unconscious or telepathic communiques from the great beyond, it's hard to imagine that a sleep disorder involving dreams could reveal so little about an individual's psyche. But this is what sleep scientists argue is the case. As Schenck noted, in both REM and NREM parasomnias, more than 90 percent of the wild stuff recorded in the sleep lab are ''automatic behaviors related to neuronal activity and/or abnormal or confusional interactions with the immediate environment.'' In the more relaxed setting of the home, he says, there is a slight increase in what he termed ''psychologically meaningful'' behaviors for people with NREM disorders like sleepwalking and sleep terrors and, to a lesser degree, sleep-related eating disorder. For those with REM behavior disorder, however, being at home makes virtually no difference. 
''In the lab, what we see a little more of aren't really 'deep-seated' psychological behaviors dealing with neurosis,'' Schenck said. ''They're more things like a mother searching for her baby and picking her baby up for fear the baby may not be safe.'' 
Maureen Strehlow, a 57-year-old woman with dark brown eyes and hair, lives alone south of Minneapolis. It has been 10 years since she first walked into the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center. At that time, she had been divorced a few years; she was living with her three children, and she was at her wit's end. 
She had discovered that she was powerless to stop eating in her sleep -- sleep, or whatever that twilight state was in which she would traverse the hall from the bed to the kitchen, usually with no recollection in the morning but aware enough at the time to rummage in the counter drawer for the stale licorice behind the coffee filters. The list of tactics that failed to thwart her behavior was long. She had tried to ''prime'' herself not to eat. She'd hung paper plates block-lettered with the word ''EAT'' with a bold slash through it. She had even hired one of her daughters at a few dollars a night to bed down in the hall outside Maureen's room on the theory that the teenager might be alert enough to intervene, or at least present an obstacle. 
''You know how kids sleep,'' Maureen recalled. ''A bulldozer could hit the house and they wouldn't wake up. The first night I stepped right over her.'' 
Maureen got rid of the sweets she usually went for, but then she discovered one morning that she had opened a can of soup and picked out the mushrooms.
She was so tired in the morning she would hit the snooze alarm six times. What bothered her more than the fatigue and the lack of control was how she was ruining her figure. For a while, she had a helpful adversary in her youngest daughter, Suzanne. 
''Five or six times Suzanne heard me get up in the night and came running upstairs from the basement. She would stand there with her hands on her hips and say, 'You're eating!' And I'd say, 'I'm not eating!' And she'd say: 'Duh! You are too!' Part of me was mad at her. And then in the morning, if I hadn't eaten, I'd be so grateful. Sometimes I was totally asleep; other times I had some awareness. I would say 75 percent of the time when I woke up in the morning I'd have no memory of getting up and eating. But then something might jog me and I'd remember.'' 
She had been eating in her sleep since her late teens, finding clues like chocolate frosting on her pillow or cherry pits and porkchop bones in the sheets. ''I thought I was the only person in the world doing this. I would wake up in the morning wondering, What did you do last night?'' 
In 1992, a friend was listening to a radio program that featured Carlos Schenck talking about people who eat in their sleep. There had been scattered case reports of nocturnal eating in the medical literature going back to the 1940's, but in 1991, again in the journal Sleep, Schenck and Mahowald described 19 cases of what they were formally introducing as sleep-related eating disorder (S.R.E.D.). 
''My friend called me at home,'' Maureen recalled. ''She said, 'This is you!' I called the center the next day.'' 
Her condition was diagnosed as S.R.E.D., which is defined as compulsive eating occurring during partial arousals from NREM sleep. It often combines elements of an eating disorder, which is considered a psychiatric condition, with elements of a sleep disorder, which in Maureen's case researchers speculate is related to a deficiency of dopamine in her brain. 
''No matter how it begins, either with stress or with another sleep disorder such as sleepwalking, sleep-related eating will usually become a nightly phenomenon,'' Schenck told me. ''The one variable is the level of consciousness associated with the eating. Usually there is partial consciousness, but in about a quarter of our patients there can be complete unconsciousness, and in about 15 to 20 percent of cases, there is full wakefulness and subsequent recall, but no control over the eating.'' 
Schenck prescribed Maureen a dopamine-enhancing medication and Tylenol 3, which contains codeine. 
''When I first started taking the medications, I was running around the neighborhood singing Hallelujah!'' Maureen recalled. ''I felt so good about myself. I started exercising. I would call up guys and ask them out to dinner.'' 
For three years her sleep-eating was well controlled by the prescriptions. But then what Schenck believes is an underlying condition emerged -- the sleep disorder known as restless legs syndrome, which is characterized by extremely painful crawling sensations in the legs. 
When I visited in October, Maureen had recently had a relapse of sleep-eating, and her restless legs syndrome was acting up. ''It's kind of depressing what I can do,'' she said, with a rueful laugh. ''Last week I woke up with the worst taste in my mouth -- I had made a sandwich out of beef-bouillon cubes in my sleep. Who'd eat that? It's probably because there's nothing to eat in the house. Even the mice have left.'' 
She showed me the route from her Victorian bed to her tan-tiled kitchen. The way was lined with potential obstacles -- her collection of large crocks, a rocking horse, a congress of teddy bears, breadboxes, ceramic pitchers -- all of which she always managed to negotiate in her sleep. When she was married, she said, she lived for a while with her mother-in-law, who was fighting cancer. She had loved her mother-in-law, and it still baffled and upset her that she could get up night after night to eat but never once think to check on the woman dying in the next room. 

Cat Boy

The treatment Maureen Strehlow received for the pain in her legs and for her sleep-eating never addressed the possibility that psychological factors might be contributing to the disorders. No one would think to look for psychological factors in restless legs syndrome. But with sleep-eating, despite its automatic quality, the role of the psyche is harder to rule out. People recoil from a strictly neurological view of behavior basic to their identity -- behaviors related to food, sex, emotions, language and even dreams -- despite the obvious distortion of dreams in REM behavior disorder.
If there was an emotional or mental cause to Maureen's sleep-related eating, something other than the varying dopamine levels in her brain, she wasn't aware of it. The persistence of the behavior over the years had disabused her of the idea that she could do much to curb her trips to the kitchen; it was more important to her to break the pattern than to hunt for psychological origins under the iffy assumption that they existed. In any case, she didn't expect uncovering them would make any difference. 
While skepticism about psychological causes ought to be routine, given how wantonly they've been applied to conditions where they had no business, sometimes there is no recourse but to invoke the psyche as the source of a parasomnia. One of the more startling episodes captured on tape at the Minnesota clinic is the nocturnal behavior of a 19-year-old known in the lab as Cat Boy. Fifty-three minutes after falling asleep, the teenager gets out of bed and begins crawling on the floor, growling, his hands folded into paws. He seizes a corner of the mattress with his teeth and shakes it. After six and a half minutes, perspiring heavily, he collapses and becomes ''clinically unresponsive.'' When technicians ask him, he reports that he has been dreaming what he always dreams -- he is a large cat following a female zookeeper with a bucket of raw meat. Here's the strangest thing of all: this parasomnia is not technically a sleep disorder. Throughout the episode Cat Boy's EEG reports that his brain is ''awake.'' 
In his case, the diagnosis was of a psychiatric condition that happened to reveal itself under cover of darkness. Researchers at the Minnesota clinic estimate that about 7 percent of their parasomnia cases are actually nocturnal dissociative disorders. And these disorders consist of almost nothing but psychologically meaningful behavior. 
''The behaviors reflect the psyche and past psychological experience usually in the context of physical, sexual, verbal abuse,'' Schenck noted. ''Many of the observed and recorded behaviors, including vocalizations (moaning and words), are a combination of sexual and sexualized behaviors -- pelvic movements and thrusting -- and defensive behaviors and vocalizations, like 'No, no, no, don't do that!' or 'You're hurting me!' or 'Stop! Stop!' The EEG is awake but the person (usually female) perceives her dissociated memory of past abuse as an actual dream, as if she were asleep even though she is technically awake.'' 
Even to a tutored eye, it is impossible to distinguish between behavior arising from a sleep disorder and behavior arising from a nocturnal dissociative disorder without a work-up in a sleep lab. For all their resemblance, parasomnias from the sleep state and parasomnias emerging from waking-state dissociations belong to different domains with different moral expectations. Cat Boy's parents were upset to learn his condition was a psychiatric disorder. The finding put the onus not on the body but on the mind -- on the waking state with its apparently defective self-control rather than on the sleep state where custom accepts that the self will vanish into the automatism of the brain. 
The expectation that we ought to be able to control ourselves is essentially the issue at stake in criminal cases. Sleepwalking has been successfully used as a legal defense in some homicide cases but has failed in others. The main hurdle is that experts cannot determine the actual state of the brain after the fact, only whether a person has a propensity for partial arousals. 
More mundanely, the premium on self-control heightens the guilt of people who exhibit sexual behavior while asleep. ''Sleep sex'' is not an officially classified disorder, but it has been the subject of a much-publicized recent study by researchers at Stanford University and has been observed since the inception of overnight sleep-lab studies. ''I got a call about this from Playboy magazine years ago,'' Mahowald told me. ''Technicians have seen it in the lab for years. It happens all the time. Most likely it's a specialized form of sleepwalking.'' 
Dr. Christian Guilleminault and other scientists at Stanford's Sleep Disorders Clinic reported on 11 cases of ''atypical sexual behavior'' during sleep. The behaviors included ''violent masturbation, sexual assaults and continuous (and loud) sexual vocalizations during sleep.'' Eight of the cases occurred in NREM sleep, three in REM. In four of the cases no psychopathology was diagnosed. In the others, a range of psychiatric ailments was found, from depression to obsessive-compulsive tendencies to anxiety, but the researchers concluded, ''We do not know to what extent the psychiatric disorders played a role in the observed behaviors.'' 

Psyche vs. Neuron

The Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center is housed on the eighth floor of the Hennepin County Medical Center in downtown Minneapolis. It has a wing for offices and consulting rooms and one for overnight sleep studies, of which the center does about 1,500 a year. On the afternoon when Mahowald was running through his parasomnia highlights reel, a crowd drifted in, Schenck among them. Mahowald and Schenck have been collaborating for 21 years. They have co-written 23 textbook chapters and 43 articles in peer-reviewed journals. They have made major discoveries and numerous contributions to the field of sleep medicine. But there are subtle, psyche-versus-neuron differences in their views, some of which reflect differences in their training and background. Mahowald, 59, was born, bred and schooled in Minnesota. As a neurologist, he has a materialist's innate suspicion of nonmaterial concepts and explanations. Schenck, 52, is a psychiatrist who grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where mentalist theories are as much a part of the landscape as alternate-side-of-the-street parking. 
Even people who had seen the clips previously stared quietly as the train of strange behaviors flashed by. The tension in the office wanted breaking. ''We rent these out on weekends,'' Mahowald said. 
A new clip started. ''Here's a sleep terror,'' he continued. ''You can trigger a sleep terror de novo, from nothing -- just the sound of a doorbell or a buzzer from a six-volt battery -- which means it's not a climax of ongoing dreamlike mentation. See this kid -- he's paying attention to exogenous and endogenous information. It's not like a nightmare when you can remember why you are frightened. In nightmares you have an accelerated heart rate. With a sleep terror you have no anticipatory increase in the heart rate.'' 
A man with REM behavior disorder appeared on the monitor fighting phantoms over his bed. A case of a person acting out a dream? 
''Either he's acting out a dream, or possibly dreaming out an act. It could be that the brain makes up something to explain the movement created by motor-pattern generators in the brain stem.'' 
Schenck piped up. ''But isn't there still room for Freud?'' he asked, using ''Freud'' as a synonym not for psychoanalytic doctrine but for the idea that what's on the mind can modify what's in the tissue. There was a deferential note in his voice, as if he knew the suggestion might irritate his senior colleague. ''One of our R.B.D. patients after his divorce said he was always dreaming of an 800-pound gorilla chasing him around the house. How can you not consider a psychodynamic influence in a scenario like that, with the man's ex-wife thinly disguised as an 800-pound gorilla?'' 
Mahowald shrugged. Was he ceding the point? On the screen now a black Labrador retriever was snoozing on his side. The dog's legs began pedaling wildly, pawing the air. Was he inventing a dream to go with the mad scrabbling of his legs -- perhaps a hot-pursuit sequence involving a mailman? 
''I don't know,'' Mahowald said with a happy little drop of arsenic in his voice, ''but I suspect he's not resolving deep inner conflict.'' 

Maybe It's a Gift

Not long ago in an Italian biology journal, Mahowald and Schenck proposed a ''state dissociation'' model of the brain. But recently Mahowald told me that he had reviewed a new book, ''The Dream Drugstore,'' by Allan Hobson, a Harvard dream researcher, and that Hobson's model, developed over the last 25 years, was much better than his own. Hobson's so-called Activation Input Modulation theory tries to account for waking, sleeping and dreaming, as well as states like coma, by picturing the mind-brain as a cube. The three dimensions of Hobson's cube reflect the three key variables that determine a person's consciousness at any given moment. The first variable is the level of activation in the brain; coma, for example, would be at the low end; waking and vivid dreaming at the high end. The second variable is the predominant source of input -- in waking, for instance, the brain's attention is concentrated on the external environment, but in REM sleep the brain is mostly minding itself. The third and most complex variable is the brain's chemical microclimate, the fluctuating mix of the neuromodulators that can enhance or impede the brain's ability to analyze information. 
''The AIM model says that the brain-mind is constantly changing states,'' Hobson said when I went up to Boston to talk to him. ''There are canonical states like sleep and waking, which we know well and about which we have little or no choice. They are probably genetically determined and highly conserved by evolution and tremendously significant. But there are all kinds of design and program errors that can happen in any complex system, and that's probably what accounts for a lot of the parasomnias.'' 
And where is the self in this enchanted complexity? Hobson is not one to write it off as a chimera yet: ''The self is a gorgeous construct, an essential construct that is capable of making many decisions. You can't tell me it doesn't matter. People will say to me, 'Oh, well, you're just as religious as the theists,' and I say, 'O.K., we might find out that it's all automated, but it sure doesn't feel that way.''' 
In another society Lindsey Conlon might be a healer or a shaman and her powers of dissociation cultivated on the trellis of a spiritual tradition. Her gorgeous construct is grappling with a parasomnia whose very name -- parasomnia overlap disorder -- attests to the potency of Hobson's model and the i