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1

SPAN Publisher James Callahan

The Presidential Elections 2000

Introducing George W. Bush

Editor-in-Chief John Burgess

Meet the President-Elect Vice President-Elect Cheney

Editor Lea Terhune

Two Concepts of Secularism Associate Editor A. Venkara Narayana

By Wilfred M. McClay

The Persistence of Paper

Copy Editor Dipesh K. Saraparhy

By John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid

Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar

Educating the Judiciary Art Director Suhas Nimbalkar

An lnterview with Judge Fern M. Smith

Search and Deploy Deputy Art Director Hemant Bharnagar Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal

By Michael Specter

Big Sur

By Robert Wernick

Research Services AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center

Front cover: This photo collage by SPAN's art studio casts American icons of secularism, the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and the Capitol dome, against the background of the Declaration ofTndependence.

All are representative ofthe American commitment to secularism, an idea which may differ according to historical periods or between groups within the society, as our cover story explains. See story on page 6.

Note: SPAN does not accept unsolicited manuscripts and materials and does not assume responsibility for them. Query letters are accepted.

Garage Biotech Is Here

By Fred Hapgood

Birding at the End of Nature

By Jonathan Rosen

Spotlight-Rishi Published by the Public Affairs Section, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Halyana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. No part of this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For permission write to the Editor.

Price of magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 125; single copy, Rs. 30.

Bhat

By K. Muthukumar

Contemporary

Indian Art

Finds a Permanent Home

A LETTER

E

FROM

ntering a new year always brings beginnings and resolutions to mind. The United States will have a new beginning with the inauguration of its 43rd President, George W Bush, on January 20th. To familiarize you, our readers, with the new administration that is about to be installed, we bring you the story of the President-elect in text and pictures.

Somewhat related to the 2000 election is an interview with Judge Fern M. Smith, director of the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C., who fields questions about judicial reform and, yes, about the role of state and federal courts in the presidential election just in case you haven't read enough about this issue already!

Our cover story is not so far from the political arena. "nv'O Concepts of Secularism" by Wilfred McClay explores an area where the personal and political sometimes meet. Ideas on secularism can differ from society to society and even within the same society. This think piece defines what secularism is to the American mind and considers some of its paradoxes.

New technology will only pick up speed in the new year. SPAN offers several articles that view various angles of it. "Search and Deploy"

by Michael Specter takes on search engines, those tools that help us browse the Internet. He investigates how they work, why they are being overwhelmed with information, and talks to a few computer whizzes for their ideas on the future of search engines.

Despite predictions of some futurists, paper and books are still with us. "The Persistence of Paper" by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid

THE

PUBLISHER

looks at how and why papers still clutter our desks. And "The Real E-Books"

by Steve Ditlea focuses on state-of-theart e-books, and explains how they are evolving into a genre of their own.

"Garage Biotech Is Here," by Fred Hapgood, has a different angle on the new technology, and brings up an area that continues to raise controversy. The author's succinct discussion of the pros, cons and inhibitors of biotech addresses both sides of the controversy. Biotechnology is eminently affordable, he says.

"Far from being cartelized by multinational agribusinesses, it is likely to be their undoing," he maintains.

For sheer entertainment with an environmental message, "Birding at the End of Nature," by Jonathan Rosen, extols the peaceful hobby of birdwatching-and asks how we may preserve the world's avian beauties from extinction. And "Big Sur," by Robert Wernick, provides a slice of life in a legendary artists' colony on the California coast, home of poets, writers, artists and bohemians of every stripe.

Catherine Karnow's photos bring alive the stunning landscape.

Finally, our usual features "Consular Focus" brings you up to date on the latest visa information and "Spotlight" tells the story of an amazing young Indian-American Rishi Bhat.

From the staff of SPAN and myself, a v~ry happy and prosperous new year.

The Presidential Elections 2000

*

Introducing George W. Bush

* * Left: George W Bush at the Republican National Convention.

Above: Bush and challenger Al Gore during one of their debates in October.

adam,do you mind if I ask you something? Why is America having election problems?" I was in a taxi on the way from Dharamsala to Pathankot when my well-informed and chatty driver posed the question. It was a question on a lot of peoples' minds, particularly outside the United States-perhaps more particularly in India, where the politically-minded citizens monitor world affairs as a pastime, and where many people were amused by the electoral contretemps in that other, great democracy. It also disclosed a very real concern about what happens to the U.S. Government at a time when it wields so much influence in the world. The electoral stalemate did not faze people in the U.S., however. It seems everyone was worried about the election but the American voters.

There were a few heated demonstrations at vote-counting venues, but more energy was put into manufacturing humor about the impasse, much of which was circulated on the Internet. Americans may have been annoyed by the goings-on in Florida and

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they may dissent with State and Federal Supreme Court rulings, but they were nevertheless confident that the government would go on. And so it has.

It took 36 days of waiting for the results, but America now has a new President: Republican George W. Bush. It was a narrow shave. He was elected because he carried the 25 electoral votes of the state of Florida, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a recount could not proceed. He was not the winner of the popular vote. Democrat Al Gore won that by a margin in excess of 300,000 votes. The quirky institution of the Electoral College then made its determination, one of the few times in history that an election has been so close as to make its vote noteworthy. Needless to say, the 2000 presidential election has raised questions about electoral procedures that many Americans hope will be addressed and rectified in the future, to prevent the recurrence of another protracted, excruciating finish.

Proposed solutions range from scrapping

the Electoral College to restructuring it according to districts within states, to prevent the winner taking all the votes, something which often does not accurately reflect the results of the popular vote. The debate will doubtless continue. Some analysts see this closely-divided election as a vote for the center; others say Bush and Gore were essentially pushing the same commodity. The U.S. Congress is evenly split between the Democrats and the Republicans. Surely, it will be a test of bipartisanship, an ability President-elect Bush has demonstrated in his home state of Texas. Discussions about what happened will continue long after George W. Bush is inaugurated as the 43rd President of the United States on January 20, 200 I. The following pages give a glimpse into the life of the next President of the United States, George W. Bush, or "Dubiya," as he is familiarly called in the press. The moniker comes from the Texas pronunciation of his middle initial "w."

1. George W. Bush with his father, George Bush, Sr., the 41st President of the United States.

2. On the campaign trail: George W. Bush with his wife Laura (at left) and vice presidential running mate Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, wave to supporters during a rally in Springdale, Arkansas.

eorge W. Bush is the eldest son of George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President of the United States. The only other set of father-son Presidents came early in the nation's history, when John Quincy Adams, son of the second President, John Adams, became the sixth President in 1825.

President-elect Bush joins a number of state governors who have moved up to the highest office in the country: Democrat Jimmy Carter, former governor 9f Georgia, elected in 1976; Republican Ronald Reagan, former governor of California, elected in 1980; Democrat Bill Clinton, former governor of Arkansas, elected in 1992; and now George W. Bush, another Republican, who was elected governor of Texas in 1994.

One of Bush's themes in the campaign was something he calls "compassionate conservatism." "Our country must be prosperous," Bush said. "But prosperity must have a purpose ...to make sure the American dream touches every willing heart. The purpose of prosperity is to leave no one out...to leave no one behind." Bush believes that this note of conservatism is "neither soft nor fuzzy. It is clear and compelling. It focuses not on good intentions but on good results. Compassionate conservatism applies conservative, free-market principles to the real job of helping real people, all people, including the poor and the disadvantaged. My vision of

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3. George W. and Laura Bush enjoy a summer day in Kennebunkport, Maine, on the Atlantic Ocean, where the Bush family has long had a summer home. With them are their twin daughters Jenna and Barbara.

compassionate conservatism also requires America to assert its leadership in the world. We are the world's only remaining superpower, and we must use our power in a strong but compassionate way to help keep the peace and encourage the spread of freedom."

The President-elect comes from a family that has long seen politics as a worthy calling. George Bush's paternal grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U.S. senator from Connecticut from 1952 to 1963. His father began his career in electoral politics in 1966, when voters in Houston, Texas, sent him to the House of Representatives. The senior George Bush was Vice President under Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1989 and President of the United States from 1989 to 1993. The President-elect's younger brother, Jeb Bush, is governor of the state of Florida. "My grandfather Prescott Bush believed a person's most enduring and important contribution was hearing and responding to the call of public service," says George W. Bush in his autobiography, A Charge to Keep. "Money and material things were not the measure of a life in the long run, he felt, and if you had them, they came with a price tag: the obligation to serve."

George W. Bush was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, where his father was a student at Yale University. Two years later, after graduating from

4. A lifelong interest in baseball led George W Bush, in 1989, to assemble a group of investors to purchase the Texas Rangers baseball team. Bush, who was a pitcher on his freshman year baseball team at Yale University, is seen here with Texas baseball legend, pitcher Nolan Ryan.

5. A Texas elementGlY school student explains her lessons to then Texas governor George W Bush. 6. Governor of Texas, George W Bush joined retired Army General Colin Powell in signing the Governor's Promise Partnership on May 25, 2000, while local schoolchildren look on. In signing the partnership, Governor Bush pledged his ongoing commitment to improve opportunities for the young people of Texas. General Colin Powell has been appointed Secretary of State for the new Bush team.

7. Cheney, who was then White House Chief of Staff, talks to then President Gerald Ford as they walk across the White House Lawn. 8. George W Bush talks with a West Texas oil-jield worker during his unsuccessfitl campaign for a seat in the House of Representatives in 1978.

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Courtesy Peabody Essex Museulll,

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Hiren De August '81 1981, oil on canvas, 137.8

from the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection.

TWO CONCEPTS

OFSECU

The meaning of secularism can differ from society to-society. Here the meaning of secularism inAmerica is considered. Though most Americans would likely agree that they live in a secular society, today two very different ideas of what it means to be secular are at odds. henever one sets out in search of the simple and obvious in American history, one soon comes face to face with a crowd of paradoxes. And none is greater than this: that the vanguard nation of technological and social innovation is also the developed world's principal bastion of religious faith and practice. The United States has managed to sustain remarkably high levels of traditional religious belief and affiliation, even as it careens merrily down the whitewater rapids of modernity.

This was not supposed to happen. Sociologists from Max Weber to Peter Berger were convinced that secularization was one facet of the powerful monolith called "modernization," and trusted that secularization would come along bundled with a comprehensive package of modernizing forces: urbanization, rationalization, professionalization, functional differentiation, bureaucratization, and so on. [fby "secularism" we mean a perspective that dismisses the possibility of a transcendent realm of being, or treats the existence (or nonexistence) of such a realm as an irrelevancy, then we should have expected religious beliefs and practices to wither away by now. To be sure, one can grant that the taboos and superstitions of the great religions transmitted a useful kernel of moral teaching.

But their supernaturalism and irrationality have to be regarded, in this view, as vestiges of humanity's childhood. Our growing mastery of our material existence enables us to understand and manipulate this world on our own terms, through the exercise of instrumental rationality. Secularity in all its fullness should have alTivedas naturally as adulthood.

Yet the world at the dawn ofthe 21st century remains energetically, even maniacally, religious, in ways large and small. And if the "secularization theory" long promoted by social-scientific

students of religion has in fact been discredited, the unanticipated resiliency of religious faith in 20th-century America may well be the single most arresting demonstration of the theory's inadequacy.

But perhaps one should not accept this claim too quickly.

Perhaps the religious efflorescence we see today is merely defensive, and fleeting. It could be argued persuasively that the United States has never been more thoroughly under the command of secular ideas than it is today. The nation's elite culture, as it is mirrored in mass media and academe, is committed to a standard of antiseptically secular discourse, in which the ostensibly value-neutral languages of science and therapy have displaced the valueladen language of faith and morals. A steady stream of court decisions since the 1940s has severely circumscribed the public manifestation of traditional religious symbols and sentiments, helping to create what has been called "the naked public square."

Perhaps the United States has lagged behind Western Europe in completing the movement toward a purer form of secularitybut it is getting there just the same. Religious expression has not been stamped out-but it has been pushed to the margins, confined to a sort of cultural red-light district, along with all the other frailties to which we are liable. The point is to confine such beliefs to the private realm and deny them public exposure. Some who hold to this view offer themselves as friends of religion.

Others are skeptics, or enemies. But all are united in the belief that a "naked public square" is the price we must pay for the nonestablishment and liberty embodied in the First Amendment.

There is, however, another way of seeing matters. In this view, it is secularism, rather than religion, whose power is ebbing away. In this view, the claim that religious liberty can only be protected by the federal government's imposition of a naked public square has come to seem as absurd as the Vietnam-era tactic of destroying villages in order to save them. Small wonder, then, that religion has responded to the challenge of secularism with a vigorous defense of its role in public life-a role that, whatever one thinks of it, shows no sign of going away quietly.

Indeed, there is a growing sense that religion may be an indispensable force for the upholding of human dignity and moral order in a world dominated by voracious state bureaucracies and sprawling transnational corporations that are neither effectively accountable to national law nor effectively answerable to wel1-

established codes of behavior. As the sociologist Jose Casanova argues, modernity runs the risk of being "devoured by the inflexible, inhuman logic of its own creations," unless it restores a "creative dialogue" with the very religious traditions it has so successfully challenged. Perhaps no event in the last quarter-century has given more credibility to this view than the profound influence ofthe Roman Catholic Church in promoting the downfall of communism in parts of the former Soviet empire; and no modern religious leader has been more keenly alert to the public uses of his faith than the current pope. But even in America there is plentiful evidence that publicly vigorous religious beliefs and practices have survived all efforts to suppress or supersede them, and are now ascendant.

One can gauge the extent of this shift not only by recourse to Gallup, Roper, and Barna polls, but by examining shifts in public discourse. Ever since the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, the taboo on public expression of religious sentiments by American political leaders seems to have been steadily eroding, to the extent that the presidential candidates in the current campaign have been publicly invoking God and Jesus Christ at a pace not seen since the days of William Jennings Bryan. The principal candidates, and President Bill Clinton himself, have warmly endorsed the efforts of what are called "faith-based" organizations for the provision of social welfare services. Clinton has repeatedly and successfully employed biblical and quasi-biblical language, particularly in his own defense. One may feel tempted to chuckle, or snarl, at these rhetorical gestures, but the fact remains that they are a form of recognition. One cannot successfully appeal to a standard, even if one does it cynically or ritualistically, if that standard is not widely acknowledged as legitimate. he signs of desecularization are reflected, too, in a long list of developments in the realms of law and governance. The overwhelming support accorded the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, although it was later overturned by the Supreme Court, was a highly significant example of this process. So too was the landmark 1996 welfare reform legislation, which included im option for "charitable choice," permitting the contracting out of public social-welfare services to openly religious organizations. As always, controversies over schooling have supplied a significant share of the flashpoints.

Not only has there been some leveling of the playing field in the competition between religious and nonreligious schools, but there is movement toward a reassertion of religious expression in public institutions, seen, for example, in the current cOUli cases involving the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools and the sanctioning of student-led prayer at graduation ceremonies and football games. Not all of these efforts wi 11succeed. Not all of them ought to. But the trend seems umnistakable.

And some things have never changed, even with secularism's impressive victories in the cOUlis and in the halls of government and academe. Prayers are still uttered at the commencement of congressional sessions. God's name appears on our currency and

in the oaths we take in court. Chaplains are still employed by Congress and the armed services. The tax-exempt status of religious institutions remains intact. Avowed belief in God remains astonishingly pervasive, and church and synagogue attendance rates remain high, at least relative to rates in other Western countries. Whether one looks upon these phenomena with approval or disapproval, the fact is that America is still not an entirely secular country, one sanitized of any form of public sanction for religion.

One could continue in this vein for some time. Yet the partisans of the secularizing view would likely not be persuaded.

They might well respond that the majority's professed belief in God is thilmer than skim milk. The now-dominant secularism might seem to be conceding a good deal of ground to religion.

But this concession only serves to consolidate its rule, by seeming to show flexibility on relatively small points. Such concessions serve to sugarcoat more consequential social changes, which, once they have fully taken root, will eventually empty the old moral and theological language of all meaning. The drama of President Clinton's impeachment suggests that the stern moralism once associated with American Protestantism is a thing ofthe distant past. It costs nothing for an American politician these days to genuflect in the direction of "religion," particularly if that "religion" is increasingly vague and morally undemanding.

Such gestures, in the secularizing view, are merely the verbal tics of a civilization in transition.

There is some truth in this view. But it underestimates the importance of words and gestures as markers oflegitimacy. And the very fact of such genuflection, even if that is all that it is, may nevertheless indicate how precarious all the secularist advances are. No one builds pedestals to the god of scientific rationality or the Comtean religion of humanity-although there is a booming trade in crystals, pyramids, horoscopes, and the services of psychics. Even the public prestige of science has receded somewhat in our own day, as a consequence of science's growing politicization, its blizzard of inflated and conflicting claims about matters such as health and diet, and the public's fears, founded and unfounded, that scientific and technological innovation has become a juggernaut lacking any sense of moral proportionality or ultimate ends.

One thing can be said without qualification: Secularism in our day boasts no energizing vision and no revolutionary elan.

Instead, it must await the excesses of the Religious Right or some similar foe to make its case, stir up its fading enthusiasm, and rally its remaining troops. Secularism sits uneasy upon its throne, a monarch that dares not speak its proper name, and dares not openly propound its agenda, if indeed it still has one. For all its gains, it seems peculiarly on the defensive, a tenured radical that has ascended to the endowed chair of culture only to spend its days shoring up the principle of stare decisis. There are no envelopes left to push. Its victory, if that is what it has enjoyed, has not come without cost. For better or worse, the elan vital has gravitated elsewhere. These days it is more fashionable to be "spiritual" than to be secular.

There is no more powerful indication of secularism's rule-

and the precariousness of that rule-than the challenge to it being mounted by an intellectually sophisticated, and increasingly ecumenical conservative religious counterculture.

First drawn together in reaction to the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v.

Wade and the subsequent liberalization of abortion laws, this counterculture is made up mainly of theological and moral conservatives drawn from the full range of organized denominations: mainline and evangelical Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. Such an entity, particularly as embodied in Richard John Neuhaus' influential journal First Things, would have been inconceivable if a powerful and entrenched secularist enemy did not exist to hold such a coalition together. In the past, it would have been precisely the most conserva-

universal truth and impersonal rationality are decried as a form of cognitive imperialism. As a result, the claims of religion are no longer so easily bracketed as private and subjective. In the postmodern dispensation, where knowledge is understood as inseparable from the discourse of particular communities, rei igious assertions have as good a claim as anything else, and a better one than most, to the mantle of "truth." Such arguments tend in practice to favor "indigenous" religion, and often leave mainstream Christianity and Judaism out of the picture, perhaps considering them too much a patt of the "Western universalist hegemony" to be worthy of attention. And in any event, these arguments may have little staying power outside the hothouse of the academy.

But their appearance certainly indicates a rest-

As the 21 st century begins, we need a way of understanding our cultural conflict that faces the facts of social division without becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of civil war.

tive Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who would have been the least likely to seek out common ground. That they are now wilJing to do so, with growing enthusiasm and commitment, is a tribute to their secularist foe. It was once the case that to be ecumenical one had to be a liberal. But that is no longer true. Now something much larger than the historical differentia of the respective faiths is seen to be at stake. That "something" is at the bottom of what we have come to calJ "the culture wars."

The reaction against secularism in recent years is by no means restricted to political or cultural conservatives. Prominent liberals such as the journalist EJ. Dionne, the law professor Stephen Carter, the theologian Harvey Cox, the psychologist Robert Coles, and the political theorist William Connolly all have written on the inadequacies of a purely secular view of the world. They may offer the most powerful evidence of all for the decoupling of secularism from modernization, since they take the position that a "progressive" or modernizing agenda need not be a secularizing one.

In addition, an increasingly influential critique is emerging from the perspectives of academic postmodernism and postcolonialism, in which Western secularism's claims to

lessness with the regime of secularism, from a position that can hardly be called "conservative" in any usual sense of the word.

So not everything we see in the challenges to secularism can be made to take the shape of a culture war. But a great deal of it does.

Defenders of religion see an aggressive secularism, which controls academia, the media, and the federal courts, and thereby largely controls public discourse. Secularists and their allies see in their opponents an incipient religious reaction, a dangerous cultural regression, a "return of the repressed" that would obliterate scientific inquiry and demolish individual liberty, and take us back to the Middle Ages. There is nothing imaginary about these conflicts. But there is nothing inevitable about their being couched in such extreme terms.

As the 21 st century begins, we need a way of understanding our cultural conflict that faces the facts of social division without becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of civil war.

The obstacles to this are formidable. As the sociologist James Davison Hunter has pointed out, our national debates are now conducted within frameworks that tend to polarize arguments, harden lines of division, and accentu-

ate the most extreme positions of either camp in order to mobilize both donors and troops.

If the conception of "culture wars" may well fmiher the very tendencies it describes, it also is admirably clarifYing. By establishing a rough parity between the sides, the term helps us see that the struggle between modernization and its discontents is not merely the battle of light against darkness, progress against backwardness, but does indeed have many of the qualities of a confessional struggle, pitting genuine and deeply held worldviews against each other-a struggle in which there is plenty of light and darkness, viltue and vice, to go around. oreover, the culture war model suggests that the conflicts described are not mere illusions or anxieties to be soothed away by therapy.

Rather, to speak of "culture war" is to insist that we are experiencing genuine conflicts over genuine issues. The effort to simply split the differences by counseling moderation and prudence, and by following the utilitarian principle that one should give the least possible displeasure to the largest possible number, may have the effect of denying what is at stake for the "hard" minorities on either side. Majorities can be wrong. And in this particular conflict, the stakes are high. The battle is being fought over nothing less than who will get to occupy the commanding heights of American life, and thereby define the nature of the culture.

To speak of "commanding heights" is to raise the question of whether the United States is, or should be, an officially secular nation. In a sense, therefore, it is also to raise the question of whether there is a de facto religious establishment in America.

This has always been a tangled and complex subject. Officially, of course, there never has been an American religious establishment. There are, as everyone knows, two clauses expressing the First Amendment's view of rei igion: a free exercise clause and a non-establishment clause. The two clauses are part of a single vision, because they complement and mutually support each other, non-establishment being a necessary precondition for free exercise, and free exercise being the surest way of ensuring the perpetuation of non-establishment.

Ofthe two, non-establishment is surely the harder provision to observe and perpetuate. It is not hard to understand why this should be so. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so the polity seeks unifYing and binding principles. There has to be a "final say" in a durable political order, and it is hard to keep a "final say" potent with nothing more than an avowedly neutral proceduralism. On the contrary: Everything we know about the functioning of a healthy political entity suggests the need for governing assumptions, legitimating myths, and foundational narratives. We have always tended to have informal establishments play that role for us. And clearly those establishments have been in flux.

Consider the situation in the American demimonde called academe. The historian George Marsden has argued that the American academy has merely exchanged one orthodoxy for another, granting today the same kind of commanding status to a

strictly secular understanding of human existence that yesterday it granted to a Protestant orthodoxy. This would be remarkable, if true. Is there now a regnant secularist orthodoxy, which, while it usually rules genially and tolerantly, is ultimately intolerant of threatening deviations from its norms? There is certainly evidence of this in the academy's suppression of explicit religious discourse and religious perspectives in scholarly discourse, not to mention hiring and promotion, and in its ferocious antagonism to the mere presentation of religious perspectives on such controversial subjects as human origins. And is this the inevitable tendency of secularism, to be as domineering and triumphalist as the religious faiths it once opposed? Is it accurate to speak of secularism as a kind of substitute religion, a reservoir of ultimate beliefs about ultimate things which stands in a continuum with conventional religious faiths? Or is secularism more properly understood as something quite distinct from, and more modest than, a religion? Has the culture war dynamic of secularism versus desecularization caused us to lose sight of this distinctive quality of "the secular," when it is rightly understood?

This question takes on an entirely different cast if one looks for a moment beyond the Western world-the West being, as Peter Berger has repeatedly pointed out, the only part of the world where secularization has been triumphant-and considers a place where the connotations of the word secularism are rather different. An example is provided by a New York Times news story dated December 6, 1999, dispatched from India. On that day, the Times reported, police arrested dozens of activists who had gathered in the northern Indian temple town of Ayodhya to protest against, and mark the memory of, the demolition of a 16th-century Muslim mosque by Hindu zealots seven years earlier. That earlier event sparked massive riots throughout the country, leaving several thousand people dead, and has remained a simmering issue ever since. Both Hindu and Islamic organizations mounted demonstrations for the anniversary. Ever since the mosque's destruction, militant Hindu groups, which refer to December 6th as "Victory Day," have been pushing to have a temple built on the site, which they believe to be the birthplace of the god-king Rama. Muslims, conversely, have vowed to rebuild the mosque, carrying signs that read "The jihad will go on." Meanwhile, miles away in Delhi, 300 activists from an organization called Citizens for Secularism marked December 6th with a march protesting the mosque's demolition.

This story neatly illustrates a simple point. What is meant by "secularism" will depend upon the cultural and historical context in which one uses the word. In contemporary American society, it means one thing: the demystified and disenchanted worldview of an affluent, postreligious society. But in the title of the Indian protesters' organization, Citizens for Secularism, it means something else. Not an antireligious worldview imposed by the state, but instead, an antitheocratic understanding of a secular state which is fully compatible with the protection of religious liberty.

This is not what we would normally call secularism in the West. But that is precisely why I have found it valuable to insist upon using the word secularism in as broad a sense as possible in

The five individuals who prepared the Declaration of Independence in /776 (left to right) were: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson.

John Adams, Philip Livingston, and Roger Sherman.

what follows, even if doing so has the effect of making that word even more problematic than it already is. For in preserving possibilities in words, one preserves their possibility in practice-including the possibility that there is such a thing as "secularism rightly understood." Indeed, the Indian protesters' understanding of secularism is regarded favorably by most thoughtful rei igionists in the West, as a vital instrument to refine and restrain reli.gious commitments, and to protect religious devotees from their own all-too-human tendencies toward fanaticism and blindness-traits that their own faiths themselves predict. To be antitheocratic is by no means to oppose religion. On the contrary, one can argue-as did Tocqueville, the godfather of all "rightly understood" words-that the American antitheocratic tradition has by and large proven a great boon to religion, practically and morally, and essential to the maintenance of healthy religious commitments.

How then are we to find the right balance in these matters, pre:serving what is good in secularism without ceding to it more than its due? We can start by distinguishing two ways of understanding the concept, only one of which is an enemy of religion. First, 'the secular idea can be understood as an opponent of established belief-including a nonreligious establishment-and a protector of the rights of free exercise and free association. Second, it can be understood as a proponent of established unbelief and a protector of strictly individual expressive rights.

The former view, on the one hand, is a minimal, even "negative" understanding of secularism, as a freedom "from" establishmentarian imposition. For it, the secular idiom is merely a provisional lingua franca that serves to facilitate commerce among different kinds of belief, rather than establish some new "absolute" language, an Esperanto of postreligious truth. The latter view, on the other hand, is the more robust, more assertive, more "positive" understanding of secularism with which I began-the one that affirms secularism as an ultimate faith that rightfully supersedes the tragic blindnesses and destructive irra-

tionalities of the historical religions, at least so far as activity in public is concerned. By understanding religious libelty as a subcategory of individual expressive liberty, it confines religion to a strictly private sphere, where it can do little public harm-and little public good.

The first ofthese two concepts of secularism, "negative" secularism, sounds almost identical to the language of the First Amendment. This in turn suggests the possibility of a nonestablished secular order, one equally respectful of religionists and nonreligionists alike. Such an order preserves the freedom ofthe uncoerced individual conscience. But it has a capacious understanding of the religious needs of humanity, and therefore does not presume that the religious impulse should be understood as a merely individual matter. On the contrary, it insists that religion is a social institution, for whose flourishing the right of free association-by which we mean the right of coreligionists to form moral communities, which can )nclude or exclude others precisely as they please-is just as important as the right of individual expression. Pluralism is a necessary concomitant of liberalism, precisely because we are social creatures, whose social existence is a prior condition to all else that we value.

It might also be pointed out that the distinction between "negative" and "positive" understandings of secularism is neatly paralleled by competing understandings of the scope and meaning ofthe secular activity we call "science." There has been a powerful tendency since the advent of modern science to see its claims as competitive with, and ultimately triumphant over, those of traditional religion. This tendency may have beenjust as bad for science as it was for religion, tending to inflate the claims of science into a reductive "scientism," replete with the declaration of metaphysical and cosmological certitudes that science, as such, cannot sustain on its own terms. A more modest, "negative" understanding of science sees it as an inherently tentative and provisional form of knowledge, defined by strict adherence to procedural norms involving the formulation of hypotheses and chains of inference, and by the careful conduct of observable and replicable experiments to test those hypotheses. Science, in this view, is unable by its very nature to affirm or deny untestable claims about the nature of ultimate reality. Science is req~ired to presume naturalism methodologically-but not ontologically.

Such a carefully limited understanding gives the magnificent achievements of Western science their full measure of respect, without obliging us to construe science as a form of metaphysics, and a sworn enemy of religion.

Such distinctions have generally been lost on the more militant secularists, whom we can call the establishmentarian or "positive" secularists. Marx knew precisely what he was doing in attacking religion, but today's positive secularists are not so clear. Tnmany cases, they honestly cannot imagine that they are imposing anything on anyone, which is why they consistently style themselves heroic defenders of civillibeliies-or, more modestly, People for the American Way. Indeed, that name, whose breathtakingly selfaggrandizing qualities surely match any parallel offenses com(Continued on page 25)

nfo-enthusiasts have thrust nothing under the hammer with quite so much enthusiasm as the paper document.

Ideas of pure information traversing digital networks lead to prophecies about the departure of paper and the arrival of such things as the paperless office, the electronic newspaper, and the digital library.

Like the home office, the paperless world seems not only feasible but, for environmental reasons, highly desirable.

The home office promises to reduce pollution by reducing commuting. Paperless work and communication, for their part, would restrain deforestation, limit the damaging effluent from paper plants, and cut between 35 percent and 40 percent of the solid waste currently pouring into landfills.

Yet despite both the means and the desire, paper remains. As digital communication grew over the past decade, so did paper consumption-from 87 million to 99 million tons per year. Over roughly the same period, many offices in particular have attempted to reduce their printing needs. Aetna, for example, claims to have shed 100 million pages annually.

Nonetheless, the amount of paper consumed in offices actually outstripped the general growth in paper, increasing by 33 percent. It's not surprising, then, that despite digitization, paper stocks offer significant paper profits. In the boom year

O

of 1998, paper companies outperformed the high-performance Dow by about 40 percent. Prophets clamor, environmentalists hope, and technophobes lament, but no one seems to be putting their money on paper disappearing any time soon.

It therefore seems worthwhile to try to understand why paper has held on in the face of direct, well-financed and impressive attacks. Like other technological attacks on conventional tools, these attacks fai I primari Iy because they have. underestimated their opponent. Digital champions generally misunderstand (or miss entirely) the remarkable resourcefulness of paper documents. In yet another case of redefinition, documents appear as mere carriers of information, a shell to be cast off now that information has reached maturity. Because documents are more than that, the assaults fail. To make better progress against paper, to make better document technologies, designers of alternatives need to understand paper better. More generally, the robust and efficient ways that documents handle information still have, we believe, a lot to teach about how to socialize a technology.

Books have been so well socialized that people barely even think of them as a technology.

There is no doubt that many paper-based artifacts are disappearing.

The black-edged letter, the social security

check, the Rolodex, the pink slip, the airline timetable, and the library catalog are all fading into oblivion (not always without a fight). And many other catalogs and manuals that were always ill-suited for paper-based documents have gone the way of Aetna's 100 million pages. As examples of paper holding its ground, however, consider the three futuristic categories mentioned above: the paperless office, electronic newspaper, and digital library.

The Paperless Office As long ago as 1975, Business Week confidently foresaw the paperless office.

The phrase quickly settled into the language as a vision of a fast-approaching future. Twenty-five years on, despite extraordinary advances in communications technology, quite unforeseen in 1975, that goal remains just that: fast approaching. Meanwhile, the volume of paper used in the office grows. In 1975, offices consumed less than 100 pounds of paper per head; now they consume more than 200. The appearance of information technology seems to have accelerated the use of paper, not diminished it.

Surprisingly, this curious symbiosis was marked early in the history of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center

How is it that, in the face of the newest digital technologies, the oldest technology of all not only survives but prospers?

(PARC). There, more than anywhere, a paperless future was an act of faith. And in the late 1970s, the personal computer, the Ethernet and local networks, and word-processing software were all under development in service of that faith.

Yet even within PARC, none of these tools, startlingly innovative though each was, was quite the "killer" it was expected to be. That came with another PARC invention, one that transformed all these inventions into the indispensable office tools we know them to be today. Bob Metcalfe, one of the Ethernet's designers, got a clear sighting of the critical addition early on. Metcalfe would regularly take down the Ethernet links connecting researchers' workstations to one

another so that he could work on the system. The traffic along the network was so light that no one bothered about the irregular downtime. Until one particular day. On this occasion, Metcalfe took the network down, and doors opened all along the corridor. His colleagues had noticed immediately that their connections had been interrupted and came straight out to see why. The difference, Metcalfe realized, was the latest PARC invention to be added to the network: the laser printer.

Time has only confirmed this early indication of paper's importance in the digital office. While other print technologies have come to compete with it, laser-printer sales have increased

twelvefold in the past decade. If the digital office from PARC to the present is anything to go by, it doesn't seem so much in opposition as in tandem.

Despite confident claims that their only relationship is one of replacement and dismissal, the two look much more like complementary resources.

The Electronic Newspaper The bulky newspaper, with its high production and transportation costs and quick journey from commodity to trash, has long presented a red rag to technological bulls. From the telegraph to the online

database, people have widely assumed that now the paper newspaper would shrink into irrelevance.

Some 50 years ago, adventurous publishers tried to replace it with a forerunner of the fax machine. Later, others offered a daily microfiche, complete with handheld readers. Advanced labs at MIT and BBN Technologies developed alternatives, and major publishers brought them to market.

Knight-Ridder lost some $50 million with its Viewtron experiment. Others-including Gateway (Times Mirror Newspapers), Keyfax (Field Communications), and Covidea (AT&T)-have all come and gone, taking a good deal of money along with them. The World Wide Web offers the latest and most serious threat, but electronic books are also muscling in.

Yet still, to the surprise of even their editors and proprietors, the inefficient and outmoded newspaper hangs on.

Meanwhile, even the flagships of the digital age lean toward print. Wired, with its flashy color, paper, and layout, is inescapably a hard-copy magazine.

Undoubtedly, there's much movement in the other direction. All major newspapers now have Websites. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the San Jose Mercury News (Silicon Valley's local newspaper) have each taken aggressive positions on the Web. Exactly what is the best position to take, however, remains unclear. Many newspapers have redesigned their sites several times, throwing money away in quantities that usually measure bits, and changed business models repeatedly. Some sites are open to all. Most give access only to the current edition. Some require users to register. Others are purely pay-per-view. A few allow subscribers to the print edition access to their archives. Some charge a separate online fee, others a fee per item accessed.

Some, like the San Francisco Chronicle or The Guardian in England, also provide a route to many resources beyond their own site but of local interest to their readers. These ventures may even be edging toward the vaunted role of Web portal.

Here the complementarity between the print and the digital world may give them

an edge over purely digital sites.

Celtainly, newspapers have a strong institutional identity and a well-honed sense of audience. And to their experience with immediacy (which the Web favors), they can add experience with archiving and access to deep archives (which the Web has tended to ignore) to position themselves.

In the confusion, as newspapers pour cash into different models for modest return (and some significant losses), one thing remains curiously secure: paper. No one seems willing to give up the material itself. Building a digital extension is clearly viable. Extracting the paper from the news, by contrast, has turned out to be much harder than expected.

Digitized Libraries The conventional library, with its massive weight of paper gathering dust and resisting efficient searches, is another paper-based institution that sets fingers itching at the keyboard. The sense that the information is "there" somewhere but can't be found can drive anyone to digitized. It motivated Vannevar Bush, a pioneer in computer design and grandfa-

ther of the U.S. National Science Foundation, which has proved a generous funder of digital library research. In a famous article in The Atlantic Monthly, Bush suggested that the difficulty scientists had in getting access to each other's work seriously damaged scientific progress. As a solution, he envisaged a system, Memex, which would compress and store documents in such a form that scientists could have access to a database of scientific knowledge from their desks through "a sort of mechanized private file and library." Memex, as many people have pointed out, looks like a prototype for the Web. The idea of a mechanized (now digitized) library has held out a popular promise that what people now find in conventional libraries will eventually be available online. Vet the dream of making all printed material digitally accessible-even all the books in your local library, let alone all the books in the Li brary of Congress-died not long after it was born. Project Gutenberg, a well-establ ished attempt to put the texts of books online, helps illustrate one difficulty. It is currently approaching 30 years of work and 10,000 titles online. A significant number. UnfOltunately, in the

United Kingdom alone, some 100,000, new titles were published in 1999-an increase of 50 percent over 1990's output.

Research has now shifted attention to digital (rather than digitized) libraries.

These look far beyond digitized versions of conventional documents. Their relation to what most of us think of as libraries is hard to fix. Some researchers see the two as complementary. Others find even the name librmy an embarrassment jlnd encumbrance on their work. Consequently, two different schools of research are developing. One, predominately British and calling itself e-lib research, retains connections to the conventional library, which it sees as its mission to SUPPOIt. The other, predominantly in the United States and calling itself d-lib research, has severed many connections to the conventional library. One seeks to complement paper resources: the other, primarily to ignore them. In both cases, pursuit of a head-on collision between the paper and the digital worlds has been left to the visionaries.

As visions, plans, and targets have shifted, perhaps the most significant change has been a growing awareness of the complexity and diversity of libraries, their holdings, and their users.

Early in the digital age, the vision of collecting "all knowledge" in a single place revived. (We say revived because the idea is at least as old as libraries and probably as old as documents.) But as these visions have confronted reality more directly, it has become increasingly clear that libraries are less "collections" than useful selections that gain usefulness from what they exclude as much as what they hold. They are also reflections of particular groups of users and their needs. As such, it's very hard to see one technology or solution fitting all.

rt:J

s these brief examples suggest, paper documents have proved more resistant than many of their antagonists (or defenders) expected. Paper is not, moreover, simply hanging on. New avenues for paper documents continue to develop, while its resourcefulness and complementary properties, though previ"

ously dismissed, are now becoming an asset for digital technologies.

The startling rise of the fax in the lifetime of the office computer is one recently developed avenue. Faxes mix the rapid circulation of information technology with many of the advantages of paper documents, including the ability to mix manuscript and typescript. Annotations can be made easily but circulated rapidly.

You can scribble "No!" beside a point of disagreement and slap it back on the fax, instead of having to write, "I don't agree with line three, paragraph 17 of section five." It's so much easier to point than to describe.

The usefulness of pointing points itself to another paper phenomenon in the age of paperlessness: the Post-it Note. At the height of digitization, this paper tool came from nowhere to be found everywhere.

The Post-it, too, helps annotate. It also efficiently attaches information to things, bridging the world of information and material objects. Again, it's much easier to write, "Take this" and stick it on a chair than to leave a list describing the chairs to be taken and the chairs to be left.

The digital world continues to acknowledge this sort of usefulness, if on occasion grudgingly. Computer faxes, though still buggy as if to register the digerati's disapproval, are now commonplace. So are digital Post-its (though you can't yet attach these to the furniture).

Word-processing systems also offer annotation. All these, however, sti II leave plenty of reasons for printing and hand annotating.

Elsewhere, attempts at replacement are curiously turning into tributes. In their slow search for viability, electronic books slavishly copy features of the conventional book. Indeed, one company is projecting itself as the true heir to the "book" because it opens to a two-page spread.

Single-page competitors, it insists, offer merely "tablets."

But nothing has paid as strong a compliment to documents as the World Wide Web. The Web made the informationally dense and inscrutable Internet intelligible, in the process turning it into the extraordi-

nary phenomenon it has become.

Somewhat like the "Windows" interface, from the user's point of view, it did this by relinquishing the mystique of information for the language of the document. Pages structure the Web. Bookmarks help us find our way back to where we have been.

Indexes and tables of contents organize it.

"Libraries" are built on top of it. And now ThirdVoice.com provides software that allows people to stick annotations on others' Websites, much to the distress of some disgruntled Website administrators, who view this more as graffiti than as annotation.

Of course, we need to ask how much this sort of talk has to do with the old-fashioned paper document. The airplane, after all, took over much of the language of the ship. It has captains and crew, galleys, cabins, gangways, and flight desks. Beyond that, there isn't much similarity between the two except that both carry passengers. So perhaps the similarity between the old document and the new is simply that both carry information. Now, it might seem, fiber optics, video terminals, magnetic storage, and search engines offer a cheaper, faster, and more resourceful means to deal with the same payload.

It seems to us, however, that this information-payload view is the source of many wrongheaded confrontations between paper and information technology. The emerging, more sophisticated view of paper documents, reveal ing both how they structure information and even how they structure society, is making the old war on paper and paper-based institutions appear not only futile but wasteful.

Complementarity and compliments rather than confrontation and abuse seem more appropriate. J n pursuit of better understanding and hence better technology, setting aside the view of documents as no more than information carriers is an important step.

0 About the Authors: John Seely Brown is chief scientist at Xerox COIp. and director of the Xerox:S Palo Alto Research Centa Paul Duguid is a research specialist in social and cultural studies in education at the University of California at Berkeley.

Educating the Judiciary An Interview with

Judge Fern M. Smith Judge Fern M. Smith is the director of the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C. She was recently part of a high-level team of American Supreme Court justices who visited India at the invitation of the Supreme Court of India to mark the inauguration of a pilot project on case management and court reform at Ahmedabad.

The Federal Judicial Center is the primary research and continuing education agency for the U.S. federal courts. It provides training to judges and court staff in classrooms and through video and audio tapes and interactive CD-ROMs. Here Judge Smith speaks about subjects ranging from judicial education, reform and the involvement of the courts in the U.S. presidential election.

SPAN: What is the benefit of judicial continuing education?

FERN M. SMITH: The law changes very rapidly these days and there are constantly evolving standards and changes in both procedural and substantive issues. Federal judges-the trial judges-are not specialized. Each federal judge has on his or her docket the whole spectrum of cases that are amenable to federal jurisdiction, so that a federal trial judge in the United States has civil cases, criminal cases, civil cases that may include employment law, maritime law, antitrust, intellectual property, contracts, civil rights, etcetera. There is just no way that any person comes to the bench knowing all of those things, nor can you keep up

with the dramatic changes that go on. So, for example, 10 years ago copyrights of computer software were not an issue that we would have necessarily seen very much. Now it's exploding.

Congress continues to pass legislation expanding or changing the jurisdiction of the courts and so they bring in new areas of the law that weren't there before. Or the rules of evidence and civil procedure are amended-which they should be, on occasion-to keep up with changes. Judges need a forum to learn about these changes and keep up with them.

So I think judicial training is critical. And there is another thing. Judging is a fairly isolated profession. As a trial judge you sit in your own courtroom or your own chambers and you basically do your work on your own. Judicial training seminars offer a forum for judges to get together and discuss common problems, to exchange ide~s on ways to do things. And out of that collection of judges talking together we at the training center get new ideas of what judges really need, what areas are missing. So we not only give them training and ideas on how to deal with things but we get from them ideas about what other things are needed, which allows us to keep changing our curriculum to keep up with what's going on with the courts.

What is the importance of new technology in today's courts?

It's a different world from what it was a couple of decades ago. I think technology has really been the driving force in the courtroom, at least in the United States, starting with 1990. It comes up in a variety of ways. It comes up first of all as an administrative tool in how the courts control the case management: how the information is controlled, how the cases get filed, how the cases proceed through the courts, how the courts keep track of cases, how attorneys get information about the status of their cases. So computers have played a tremendous role in easing the burden, in freeing up the staff from very tedious, hand recording of documents. It has freed up space because this mound of paper is reduced substantially.

Technology has made a huge impact in the way cases are perceived in the courtroom. Documents now come in through computers and on screens. There is computer-generated evidence.

Lawyers keep track of their documents on computers which they

bring to the courtroom. For example, one of the big issues of litigation in federal courts recently has been the breast implant litigation. There are thousands of cases all across the United States and there are literally hundreds of thousands of documents from the various companies involved in this. I had a very experienced and well respected lawyer tell me that she could walk in the courtroom now with her laptop and try a breast implant case without a piece of paper. Just by pulling up the documents she needed on her laptop and having them illustrated in front of a judge and the jury.

Another area concerns what technology has done to the substantive law itself. Technology has become, perhaps, the driving force of the American economy now-software and all kinds of cyber commerce. It has changed where the money is, to be quite honest. So in a lot of the major law firms in the States now, this new economy is the focus of their practice. That's where the big time practice is because that's where the big time money is.

More and more of our cases actually involve cyber issues. It's patents on computers, it's copyright on software, it's information management, it's who owns what and it's where the things occur.

There is also the increased role of expert witnesses, and the need for judges to be scientifically and technologically aware.

To go back to breast implantation cases again: to prove medical causation you go into toxicology, you go into epidemiology. One of the cases I had recently involved DNA. How is DNA spliced, how is it produced in the laboratory, what does it do, how does it work? Ajudge can't decide a case like that without having some knowledge of the underlying science. For all of those reasons, technology has made a huge difference in the way courts operate and what they do. I think in the coming decade you are going to see more cases actually tried by people who may not even be in the courtroom. You are going to have video conference hearings with the attorneys present on the video screen who are actually sitting all over the country if not all over the world. You are going to have cases where witnesses thousands of kilometers away will appear on a video screen. You will have ajudge sitting perhaps in one city with all the witnesses and all the attorneys sitting in another city. And that comes with problems. It may be a wonderful way of saving costs and time and making things more efficient, but there is also another side of the coin. Does it change the way you can address the credibility of a witness?

When they are on a screen do you know as much about them as you did before? When you are dealing with documents that are coming off of a computer can you tell whether they have been altered in some way? What does that do to privacy, when things are going out over the Internet? What's that going to do if insurance companies or employers can get hold of the fact that some person has a genetic predisposition to some illness? Does that change the public access and what people can do? It's sort of a brave new world. The world is just moving very quickly.

It is clear that the law is lagging behind the developments in many cases. How can that be addressed?

I think we address it partly in judicial training, in helping

judges keep up with it: if not a Ph.D. education in the sciences, at least enough knowledge so that ajudge knows what questions to ask. Maybe enough knowledge so that ajudge knows what he or she doesn't know and knows how to find the resources to help fill in those gaps. Judicial training, I think, is critical in that area.

What avenues do you see for judicial reform in India, where the courts are overwhelmingly backlogged?

I think there are a few things that could be of some assistance.

One is to get the courts automated. They've got to find a way to streamline the whole record-keeping process so they know where these cases are. It's just not feasible to take down records by hand. I understand they have been moving along in that process.

Also, from what I understand, the lawyers here are able to drag a case on for pretty much as long as they say it is appropriate. I think the courts need to have the ability and the willingness to step in and basically take charge of the cases themselves, which is what we started doing in 1990. In the United States prior to 1990, it was not terribly unusual for a civil case to go on for four or five years, depending on what state it was in. In California, for example, they had a five-year dismissal statute, so that if a civil case wasn't tried within five years it would be dismissed unless there was some good cause for it. And so cases did drag on and in the federal courts, too, they often went on for three and four years. And finally, what happened in 1990, was that Congress got annoyed with how long these cases were taking and how much money they were costing. So Congress actually passed a statute, the Civil Justice Reform Act of 1990, which ordered the courts, in a sense, to take a more active role, and required reporting from the courts about how long cases were taking to get through and giving the courts a mandate for the trial judges to get involved and to set the schedules and to get more active. I think it's fair to say that initially the courts were very resistant to the idea of Congress ordering the courts to do something. In retrospect, however, while there was some just cause for the courts' concern, I think the courts have benefited from this. The delay in the federal courts has been significantly reduced. And not only that, a lot of the state COutts, which were also bogged down, saw what was happening in the federal courts and have voluntarily adopted some of these mechanisms. So the backlog in a lot of the state courts is being reduced. I don't mean to imply that we now have a perfect system. We don't. And there are still COutts both in the federal system and some state systems that have serious backlogs. But when I say serious again I mean four to five years, not 15 to 20 which is what, I understand, happens here in India.

Another thing required is better cooperation between the courts and other branches of government. You've got to have the funding branch willing to support the courts and give them enough resources to do some of these things, to provide computers, and some sort of technology. And [ think the concept of law clerks, which is relatively unknown here, would be of huge benefit. For judges to have more assistance in some of the

The Supreme. Court of the United States Created by the Constitution, Article Ill: nine justices, appointed for life by the President, with the "advice and consent" of the Senate.

Interprets and applies the Constitution and all federal statutes, after decision by federal courts of appeals and state supreme courts. Hears argument in about 100 cases each year.

State Trial Courts All cases, criminal and civil; trials with or without jury. One in each country or similar geographic area. Jurisdiction: state constitution; statutes, common law; also federal Constitution (including most of Bill of Rights) and statutes. Limited by the supremacy, commerce, full faith and credit, and equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Federal Agencies Securities and Exchange Commission, National Labor Relations Board, Environmental Protection Agency, etc.

U.S. Conduct set bail, complex

Magistrate Judges preliminary hearings, assist district judges in cases, try some cases.

StatelLocal Agencies Industrial accidents, zoning boards, licensing boards, etc.

Limited Jurisdiction Courts Small towns, a Justice of the Peace; large urban centers, a municipal or district court.

Jurisdiction: petty crimes, traffic offenses, small claims.

No jury.

underlying research and the preliminary summarizing of information would help then; considerably.

Alternative dispute resolution: this is, again, a growing movement in the United States and it makes a huge difference. You've got to find quick, inexpensive ways to resolve cases without every case needing to go through a full court process. My understanding is that lawyers in India are extremely resistant to alternative dispute resolution, and from what I understand the primary reason is because they are afraid it will hurt their income. But it won't. And they need to understand that loss of income doesn't necessarily occur. The alternative dispute resolution process in the United States has grown tremendously in the past decades, and not just in the big, complicated commercial cases, but just as much if not more so in the small, run-of-themill cases-in mediation of family disputes, for example, divorce and custody matters. Out of court discussion settlements.

Lawyers become trained in how to do this and as a consequence, in the United States now, probably less than five percent of the cases that are filed actually go to trial. The others are resolved somewhere else: arbitration, mediation, judicial settlement conferences, a process called early neutral evaluation, and it doesn't mean that the lawyers are sacrificing their incomes. Lawyers are making more money today in the United States on the average than they've ever made before in their lives. So it simply means that instead of taking one case and milking it for 15 years, you take a number of cases and you resolve them quickly and expeditiously and you keep moving and you learn more and you provide more justice for more people and it keeps things moving in the courts. So I think that would be a tremendous benefit to the court system here in India.

And the other thing, frankly, and this is really a policy issue, and it's one I'm not equipped to resolve or have any learned opinions on, but my understanding is that the Supreme Court in India has become basically the social legislator of the country. If they are busy running the government, they can't also be resolving cases. That's just too much to expect. I don't know what the answer to that is. As I say, those are policy and political issues.

The Supreme COUlt in the United States, for example, sits only as an appellate body. They have discretion over the kinds of cases they take, and they are not running the government.

Somehow India has to find a way to come to grips with that if their judicial system is going to be able to struggle out of this gridlock that it's in.

During the post-election process in the United States there was a great deal of activity in the courts. Could you explain for our readers, who are used to the Indian system of only one Supreme Court, how this works?

In the United States there are 50 states. Each state has its own independent judicial system. Most of them are somewhat similar, but not completely similar. It's a matter of the state constitution and the state legislature defining the system for any given state.

Then there is the federal judicial system, which is separate from any of the states and parallel to them, so that the federal system

does not have supervisory duties over the state courts, except in some very limited ways. So that in Florida, for example, they have the Florida State judicial system. And in Florida the highest COUltis the Florida Supreme Court, which has made various rulings regarding the election. The United States Supreme Court doesn't supervise the Florida Supreme Court, but if there is a violation of the Federal Constitution alleged, then the United States Supreme Court has an independent right to review what the Florida Supreme Court has done, so the U.S. Supreme Court only gets involved when the highest court in a state somehow has violated the Federal Constitution. That was the allegation that brought them into the election process. The allegation was that the Florida Supreme Court, in ordering the recount of the vote to continue, violated an article of the United States Constitution and a particular federal statute. That's why the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to review the action of the Florida Supreme Court.

It's a very different system that exists here, where basically the federal and state courts are palt of a unitary system. In the United States they are not. They are parallel systems. And they only come into contact with each other when the state issues somehow are viewed as violating the United States Supreme Court.

What about women in the law? Are more women being admitted to the bar and to the bench?

I think it has changed considerably. I went to college and law school very late. I didn't get out of law school until 1975, and by then things were just starting to improve. But I practiced law for 11 years and never once appeared before a woman judge. They were few and far between, even in California, which had one of the best records for women on the bench and in the law. There were more conservative states that were a decade behind.

In my court in San Francisco, for example, a federal court, the first woman was appointed to that COUltin 1980. I was the second woman on that court and wasn't appointed until 1988. But now out of 14 positions on that court, six of us are women, so it's almost 50 percent. Most of the major law schools in the United States now have about a 50 percent enrollment of women.

However, there is an interesting phenomenon going on. A lot of my former law clerks are women. And law clerks are the best of the best. They come from very good schools and they do really well at school. These are a group of women who accomplished tremendous things and who came out at the top of their classes.

Very few of them are practicing law now. And it's a voluntary issue for them. It's not because they can't get jobs, it's because many of them have chosen deliberately to take time out, to have families, and to raise their families. I think there are a number of things leading to that. The importance offamily has re-emerged, and the freedom to spend time with your family and have those years is valued more. But also the incredibly he'ctic pressures of practicing law in the United States has really discouraged a lot of people. Law firms charge more and more money, they pay bigger and bigger salaries, but they demand more and more time from the lawyers. And there are a lot of people now, men and women in the profession, who just don't want to do that.

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The race to build a better search

Se Dep t's not easy to impress the people who fly into Scottsdale, Arizona, each spring to attend the annual PC Forum.

The event, organized by the Internet impresario Esther Dyson, is held at a resort near the foot of the McDowell Mountains, and it has become a sort of digital Renaissance Weekend. This year, the conference was so heavily stocked with the fatted calves of the "new" economy-most ofthem dressed in the casual E-commerce outfit of khaki pants and blue oxford shirt-that controllers at Scottsdale's tiny airport struggled to accommodate all the corporate jets.

The Dyson conference began as a specialized gathering 23 years ago, when the Web was mostly a military secret. Like the Internet itself, however, the PC Forum has spread far beyond its initial boundaries. (It retains its quaint name as a reminder of what it was; these days, PCs are beside the point.)

"We try hard to keep the meetings from becoming just a survey of what's going on," Ms. Dyson told me, when I asked her how she decided what to focus on each year.

Order is on Dyson's mind at the moment because the Internet has become so resistant to discipline. There are now more than a billion pages on the World Wide Web, all loosely tied together by seven billion annotated links, called hyperlinks, which is at least one link for every person on the planet. Each day, more than a million pages

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are added, and a page can appear in any language, written by any person, for any reason; it can be three lines long or the length ofthe Bible. For the first time in history, people everywhere have access to the thoughts, products, and writing of a large-and growing-percentage of the earth's population.

This much democracy can be daunting.

As more information fills the Web, and more people become dependent upon it, search engines-programs that hunt for Web pages in response to specific words or phrases-have become overwhelmed.

"People are beginning to feel a little lost in all this opportunity," Dyson said. "For the Internet to work, and to be liberating, it has to be easy to use."

Too often, however, it is not. When r type "How do you skin a mule?" into most search engines, for example, I get thousands of answers-and they refer to everything from drug dealers to shoes to skin color and radiation treatment for a variety of cancers. Most answers are useless. If I want to know the current population of Rome and type the phrase "population of Rome" into Infoseek, a well-known search engine, approximately 29,000 replies come back, and among the first are pages on "world depopulation and slavery" and "the history of the white race," and a page titled "The Cure of the Neurobiological Sickness of Religion, Part 2."

The reason for the muddle is simple: most search engines are programmed to unleash software called "spiders," which systematically crawl through the Web sucking up every link on every page. When they have digested what they have found, the spiders generate indexes of the words and the links. So even if the word "population" appears in a sentence about ancient Greece, and the word "Rome" appears far away on the same page, perhaps in an advertisement for a hotel in upstate New York, most search engines would consider the page relevant. It would have been easier to track down Rome's chief demographer. "It's ironic, but, the bigger the Internet gets, the more difficult it is to find a simple, accurate answer to your questions," Lawrence Page told me before the first major presentation, on navigating the World Wide Web, at last year's PC Forum.

At the age of27, Page runs-with a fellow former Stanford graduate student, Sergey Brin-a small company, based in

Mountain View, California, named Google, which has become the default search engine ofthe digital in-crowd. "The more information there is out there, the more likely you are to get junk or lies for an answer," Page told me. "You want relevant information, but you are fighting with chaos."

The moderator of the presentation, Kevin Werbach, was having trouble getting the audience to focus, because everyone was distracted by a series of seemingly urn-elated phrases scrolling by on a giant screen: "Fishing boats. Lesson plans format. ICRA. Woodpecker control. Origin of God." (Google, which derives from the word "googol"-the numeral one followed by a hundred zeros-had set up a live feed ofthe 13 million queries that it gets each day.)

"Unholy dancers. Drug testing in high schools. Compulsive hoarding.

Free wife-swapping stories. Bald. Shaved."

"Let's go to the panel," Werbach said as the scroll continued. "Hopefully, it will be more interesting than seeing the queries."

That produced a chorus of boos, because it's hard to imagine a computer conference generating anything more exciting than the thrill of watching what the world is trying to find out.

A few days after the conference ended, I walked into the Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University. It is a gaudy place on a campus that works hard at being sedate, and it is where Page and Brin were working toward Ph.D.s when they thought up the idea of Google. I had come to see Rajeev Motwani, an associate professor in the computer-science department and the author of a standard work on computational algorithms-the mathematical recipes that make software work. Motwani, a cheerful 37-year-old man with short black hair, a mustache, and eyes the color of wet coal, has spent a lot of his recent career trying to figure out a better way to search.

Before the Internet, there were electronic information services-like Lexis-Nexis-but they have always been

narrowly focused, expensive, and, for most people, difficult to deploy. When the World Wide Web came into popular use, people realized that search engines were a powerful tool. Most people, though, never understood that the searches were limited and that the quality of the results varied greatly. (This is still true; even the largest of the search engines, Inktomi, has indexed only about half the Web. So far, the rest is dark matter; if the page you want is trapped there, it doesn't make any difference which search engine you use.)

It is common knowledge that if a search fai Is to retrieve relevant information within a couple of seconds, most surfers will click away and try someplace else. In those few seconds, as the engine crawls through millions of links, many problems need to be solved-the biggest of which is called "the verbal-disagreement problem." Verbal disagreement means that if you have a certain concept in mind and you ask two people to describe it, they will

give you two completely different, but entirely correct, words. Conversely, two people using the same word could be talking about entirely different concepts. The Internet magnifies that problem immensely. If you search for the word "automobile" on the Web, for instance, you are likely to miss many pages that use the word "car" instead. "Search engines are far better than even five years ago," Motwani told me. "But most of them are still like primitive buzz saws cutting down giant forests to look for a single tree. If you ask me if they are delivering the way I think they should, I would say we are at Step One in a ten-step process." nternet search has evolved rapidly since 1993, when a program called WebCrawler became the first widely used search engine. These days, there are about two dozen major search engines, most of which rank Websites based on their contents. Yahoo!, which is probably the most popular, isn't really a search engine at all. It employs a team of editors to index the Internet; if you want a page to show up in a Yahoo! search, you must submit a form with information about the site.

Some people will do almost anything to receive a top ranking from a heavily used search engine, and it's easy to understand why: the first response in a search will bring more viewers, more business-and the SOli of prominence that gets a site ranked more highly by other search engines. The ploys people use to get there are often deceptive.

Pages can repeat words many times in invisible type (masked in a color that is the same as the color of the page) so that the search engine picks them up and ranks them as more relevant than it otherwise would.

For example, some automobile Websites have stooped to writing "BUY THIS CAR" dozens oftimes in hidden fonts. That way, a search engine will count the words "buy" and "car" and rate it highly-a subliminal version of listing AAAA Autos in the Yellow Pages.

The most direct way to get your Website to the top of a search-and the most pernicious-is to pay for it. At GoTo, a popular search engine, payment is routine. As the Internet newsletter Search

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Engine Watch has pointed out, "A company might bid on the word 'travel,' agreeing to pay twenty-five cents per click. If no one agrees to pay more than this, then your company would occupy the top spot-and every time someone clicked on your link, you'd owe GoTo twenty-five cents." That's your "cost per click," and for a much frequented travel site it's a bargain. (At other engines, you can pay for how many times somebody sees your ad, rather than just for clicks.)

As a result, if you type "Harvard" into GoTo, you won't get to the Harvard University home page until you have seen links for Gradschools.com and Harvard Hotels, among others. The people who run search engines say you need to deliver the goods within the first 10 entries, but at GoTo the Harvard home page is No. 14.

At Infoseek and Google, neither of which takes money for placement, the Harvard home page comes up first.

Motwani knew that for a search to be more effective it would have to move beyond lists and pay for placement. "The Web is a network of hyperlinks, and this network is sometimes called a graph," he said. "If someone goes to the effort of introducing a hyperlink into a Web page, you ought to be able to make judgments about it."

What Motwani and several other researchers recognized was that one could look at surfing around the Web as similar to taking a random walk on a giant grid, sort of like wandering aimlessly around Manhattan. If you pick a starting point at random, click on a series of random hyperlinks, and watch long enough as people surf around, you can make statistical statements about how likely it is that a person will end up at any particular site. "] understood all this, and so did many other people," Motwani said, smiling sheepishly. "But I didn't see the implications." Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin did.

"They had this idea, a new way to look at the links on the Web. Other people had thought about link structure, of course. But they took it further. All of a sudden, we were no longer talking about Web pages. We were talking about a giant community, and each link was a relationship between members of that community."

The system, which Page called PageRank, permitted Brin and Page to improve on the standard practice of counting how often a key word appears on a Website. They realized that if a page is Iinked to many other pages it's like a vote-the collective voice of the Web has decided that the page has a certain value.

If millions of people link to a page, it's a good endorsement. It doesn't mean that the link is accurate, but it's likely to be a more useful authority than a page nobody points to. Page and Brin realized that it was possible to map the Web and rate pages primarily by analyzing links instead of words. (In fact, they are so confident of Google's accuracy that they put an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on their page.

Click on it, and you go directly to the highest-ranked site for your search.)

Such searches can require millions of computations, but essentially the rating you get is based on who "voted" for you by establishing links to your site. (The engine also looks at how many votes were cast for the pages that were linked to those pages. If the home page of the Times links to your page, you will be ranked more highly than if, say, just your cousin Harvey links to your home page. That's because many other pages link to the Times, so it brings in lots of votes.)

"Before this, people were just looking at the content," Motwani told me. "They were completely ignoring the fact that people were going to the effort of putting a link from one page to another and that there must be a meaning to that."

Google is not the first search engine to look at the links on the page; Excite and Lycos have also done it. But Page and Brin's Google has raised the bar. "Their system just works much better than anybody else's does," Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Watch, told me. "Now every major search engine will have to use it. Nobody can afford to do anything less."

I tried it out. r typed "population of Rome" into Google. The program did a quick calculation of the value of all the pages with those words on it, assessed the links that connected them, and figured out the relative value of each page on which the words appeared. It then looked at the posi-

tion of the words on the page, the size of the fonts, and the likelihood that the words were related to each other. That took 0.38 seconds. By then, I had a list of84,000 possible responses. It wasn't a perfect search; Google had no way of knowing whether I meant ancient or modern Rome. Unlike any other search engine I tried, however, Google did address my query about the population of Rome, Italy. (My first ten responses in Yahoo!, on the other hand, included two entries for Rome, Maine, and one for Rome, ew York. The first mention

"Wecan see developing, That really It could be

sion. He gets his news by watching the questions people ask Google in search queries. "Usually, the most popular queries are sex and MP3," he said. "One day it will be sex, the next MP3. But you can sort of gauge important events by looking at the queries. The day after the Grammys, for instance, we were getting tons of hits that involved the words 'Jennifer Lopez' and 'dress' and 'naked.'''

I asked him if there were many requests for information with the words 'Gore' or 'Bush' or 'campaign' in them." ope," he

patterns as they are trends, ideas, communities. could be powerful. beyond search."

of the Rome I had in mind was on a page entitled "Xiphoid's Rise of Rome Conpluvium." AltaVista wasn't much better. It had nothing of direct value in its first 10 responses, one of which was the home page of a Baltimore real-estate agent whose last name is Rome.) oogle can be fooled, of course.

Anybody who takes the trouble to set up a group of pages with links to each other can force his way into the ran kings, with some rather odd results.

Brin told me to type in the phrase "more evil than Satan itself," and the first response was the Microsoft home page.

(The response just shows that there are many people on the Web who seem to use the words "evil" and "Satan" when referring to Microsoft-and that they tend to link to each other.) "It's not a trick," Brin said one evening. "But if you want to just say it's possible to get bad information on Google, I'll understand. It's possible to get bad information anywhere."

Google's offices are spread through a sort of dot-com strip mall not far from Palo Alto. It's a graduate-student Disneyland, filled with Rollerblades and assorted hockey paraphernalia for twiceweekly company hockey games. The of-

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fices are stocked with enough free M&M's, PowerBars, barrels of granola, urns of coffee, and coolers offruitjuice to drive anybody through to 4 a.m.-which is not an unusual time to find people in the office. ot everything is in place yet, though. When I visited, a baby-grand piano and a new espresso bar were both on order, so the lobby looked a little bare.

A gym is on the lower floor, next to a sauna and a room for massages. There is a massage therapist on site every day-and all employees are encouraged to make use

of her services. The biggest perk, however, is the cafeteria. Page and Brin have hired an accomplished chef-he formerly worked for the Grateful Dead-to cook organic meals. The food is free, and all employees are fed lunch and dinner (and so are friends and family members who wish to join them, as long as the chef is given advance notice).

I had lunch one day with a few of the company's researchers, including Jim Reese, who told me that he was employee No. 19. His business card describes him as chief operations engineer and head neurosurgeon.

That's because, before coming to Google, he was a neurosurgeon, at Stanford. Reese spends a lot of his time at Google's "server farms," warehouses filled with computers that have the fastest connections to the Internet. One of Google's facilities is run by a company called Exodus, in nearby Santa Clara, and Google stores some of its network of nearly 4,000 Linux computers there, each with 80 gigabytes of hard-drive space, on which it keeps constant downloads of the Web. (Many other companies, including Hotmail and eBay, use Exodus as their electronic storage vault.)

Reese told me that he has been too busy lately to bother with newspapers or televi-

said, and laughed. "It's a sad comment to make, but nobody seems interested."

About 10 percent of Google queries are for pornography. The figure is lower than that of most other search engines. This reflects the demographics of the people who use tile search engine, but perhaps it also demonstrates one of Google's obvious failings: porn sites are sought out by millions ofTnternet users but are rarely linked to prominent Web pages. Without links, even the most popular page is invisible.

If you add up the ages of Google's founders, it comes to 53-younger than the average age of a CEO of a major company that doesn't have "dot" or "com" in its name. Page and Brin are pleasantly disheveled workaholics who find it amazing that they don't have to subsist on bun'itos. The company has not yet gone public; Brin and Page each take $80,000 a year in salary, which, as Brin pointed out, is more than 80 times what he was making while he was in graduate school.

Brin's family came to America from Russia when he was six. His father teaches math at the University of Maryland, and his mother works at the Goddard Space Flight Center at NASA. Page's father, who died a few years ago, was a com puter-science professor at

Michigan State. Page was one of those kids who spend their youth taking everything in the house apart. When he and Brin met, at Stanford, they had complementary interests in computers. "I was working on the link structure of the Web," Page said.

"A sOli of mathematical problem about which pages pointed to which other pages.

That's all I was doing. Sergey was working on data mining. He was looking at how useful information could be extracted from large quantities. of information."

It didn't take long for them to attract backers. Stanford has put money into Google, as have the venture-capital firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim is an investor, too. Still, one of Google's draws is also its biggest liability: all it does is search. There usually isn't much money in that, which is why so many search engines-like AltaVista, Infoseek, Excite, HotBot, and, above all, Yahoo!-have become Web pOlials where you are encouraged to chat with friends, use e-mail, and look at news wires or stock prices.

Page plans to sell his service to pOltals like Yahoo! and Microsoft, which would pay Google a fee based on how many of their searches Google manages to complete.

It already has an arrangement with such paltners as Netscape and the Washington Post. Advertising has increased sharply this year-largely because users have, too. So far, Google permits ads to appear only in text form, since text loads faster than graphics, and the company allows no more than two to appear on any page. "We want to be the fastest search engine," Brin told me.

"The fastest and the best."

There seems to be a generation of people for whom the Internet is the principal source of infolmation about the world. When they need to solve a problem or answer a question, they go to the Web, and that is where they find "reality"---even though the Web often confuses what is "true" with what is "popular." (In "The Economic Analysis of Law," Richard Posner observed, "The true utterance is like the brand of beer that commands ninety-five percent of the market and the false like the brand with only five percent.") If you ask most search engines how

many home runs Mickey Mantle hit in 1958, you will get some answers that are right and some that are wrong; on the Web, where fantasy-baseball sites are at least as popular as Yankee statistics, it is hard to distinguish what is popular fi'om what is true.

"That is the greatest challenge,"Andrew Tomkins told me. "Making the truth shine through."

Tomkins, who recently received a Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon, is a researcher on the IBM Clever Project, a search engine that so far is used only at the IBM Almaden Research Center, in San Jose, California. Clever is similar in approach to Google-it looks at links and not just at key words-but it may yet produce a more finely tuned way to find information and assess it. Where Google essentially assigns a fixed value to all links, based on how highly other links value them, Clever's rating allows the links to shift in value depending on the search request. lever's analysis follows from this sociological observation: the Web contains many pages filled with useful pointers to specific information.

Someone interested in fishing can find plenty of pages with titles like "My Fishing Links." In a traditional search engine, you would type "fishing" and g~t back a considerable amount of useless information. "Eventually, though, you would probably find a valuable page," Tomkins told me. "Call it 'Joe's fishing links.' Joe is not the guy who won the bass master classic, but he is a grad student in some place and he loves to fish. He is enthusiastic and he has the perseverance to keep his page up to date, and he is really versed in the on-line fishing community.

So he created this page with a bunch of links. About fishing. So it's a familiar experience to find a page filled with these useful links. And when you see it you say, 'Ab, finally,' and maybe you bookmark it.

This we call a 'hub page.'

"Just through the evolution of the Web, these pages are all over the place," Tomkins continued. "And they are there on every conceivable topic. We found really good hubs on oil spills off the coast of Japan. And on Australian fire brigades-and on people

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who go off into the woods on the weekend and wear inflatable sumo costumes and wrestle. Clever tests each link, analyzes the text on the pages, and looks for key words."

Then, unlike Google, it analyzes the hubs to discover "authorities"-pages that on-line fishing expelis regard as the most useful and interesting-and uses the authorities to help judge the quality of the hubs.

Emerging from all that is what Tomkins describes as "the footprint of a community," and he goes on, "The surprising thing is that as the number of pages grows-the billions, zillions, tri IIions-the number of these communities that emerge from random association shrinks. I decide that it's really impoltant to me to find out wherever fish turn up in stained-glass windows. J find a picture of some stained-glass windows and create a Web page. This is my page with the links to stained-glass windows on it.

Nobody cares. Then in Siberia there is some guy who happens to have the same interest, and he creates a page that also links to that stuff. And some other similar stuff. And as soon as that happens we find it. Because I link to these pages. And he links to these pages as well. Even though neither of us knows there is a community on this topic, we can find it and use it in anyway we want.

This is a way to understand the emergence of low-level grassroots sort of things. We can see patterns as they are developing, trends, ideas, communities. That really could be powerful. It could be beyond search. It could give people what they are looking for."

Over at Google, Page and Brin also wonder whether Clever will be what people are looking for. "It's a good approach," Page told me. The two systems "were conceived in similar ways. But Clever uses additional information that is very prone to manipulation-or spam-by people trying to mislead the search engine for commercial gain." Page went on, "The great thing about search is that we are not going to solve it any time soon. There are so many problems and failings. I see no end to what we need to do. Ifwe aren't a lot better next year, we will already be forgotten."

P About the Author: Michael Specter is a The New Yorker staff writer based in Rome.

mitted by the late Moral Majority, perfectly expresses the unstated presumptions of our informal secular establishment. Its effolis have been aimed at creating and enforcing the naked public square. Under the guise of separating church and state, it seeks to exclude religious thought and discourse from any serious pmi in public life, and to confine religious belief and practice, as much as possible, to the realm of private predilection and individual taste.

So we return to a key question: Is secularism itself a kind of faith, our new established religion? Or is it rightly understood as something very different from religion, in the way that science as a mode of inquiry and understanding is distinct from religion? Is there a way we can enjoy the fruits of secularism without elevating it into a substitute orthodoxy, a new establishment, not of a religion, but of irreligion?

The use of the modifiers "negative" and "positive" here will remind some of Isaiah Berlin's 1958 essay "Two Concepts of Liberty," to whose title I have shamelessly alluded in my own. I have not done so merely for literary effect. The dichotomy that Berlin devised can help clarify the concept of secularism. The parallels arise almost immediately. Berlin set out in his essay to explore "the permissible limits of coercion" in political life. Our concern here is not at all dissimilar, since it deals with the appropriate limits of what I have called "establishment," which is itself a kind of moral and intellectual boundary constraint. But Berlin's suggestiveness does not stop there. It can be traced to the very heart of the essay, and Berlin's distinction between negative liberty, which designates a freedom from external interference, a freedom to be left alone, and positive liberty, which means a freedom to be self-governing and self-directed, to be "one's own master."

Stated this way-as freedom from meddling, versus freedom to be one's own boss-the two concepts oflibeliy may not seem very different. But each had implications buried within it that would ultimately cause the two to diverge sharply, and arrive at very different destinations, with very different consequences.

Negative liberty is freedomfrom; it involves the deflection of potential hindrances and the guarding of privacy, in the interest of creating the maximum "free area for action." Positive liberty had aims that were higher and nobler. It sought to free human beings to fulfill the most exalted elements of their nature. But it also was far more dangerous than negative libeliy in Berlin's eyes, because its pursuit could so easily lead to authoritarian or totalitarian political arrangements.

The logic by which Berlin arrived at this conclusion is especially relevant. He emphasized that for human beings to become masters of themselves they had to be self-overcoming, bringing the elements of recalcitrance or false consciousness in their makeup under the control of their rational faculties and "better selves." This meant the practice of relentless self-coercion, in the name of a "higher freedom," precisely the sort of activity we would call "self-discipline." But what starts out as self-coercion may in time become hard to distinguish from external coercion, since, as Berlin observed, "we recognize that it is...at timesjusti-

fiable to coerce men in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health) which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue, but do not, because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt."

Thus, however, is the door opened to coercion, in the name of honoring the "true self' and freeing it from illusion, from being "ruled by myths," and from various forms of "heteronomy," or external domination. Positive liberty aspires to nothing short of a godlike state of autonomy and self-mastery. In so doing, it relies upon the demystifying power of modern science to dissolve the illusions that suppOli irrationality. The greatest thinkers of the 19th century, men such as Comte and Mm-x, were partisans of various forms of positive liberty. They believed, Berlin wrote, that "to understand the world is to be freed," but that most people are "enslaved by despots-institutions or beliefs or neuroses-which could be removed only by being analyzed and understood." Most of us are "imprisoned by evil spirits which we have ourselves ... created, and can exorcize them only by becoming conscious and acting appropriately." Ye shall know the truth-a scientific, secular, and naturalistic truth-and that truth shall make you free. ut the very beliefs that enable one to penetrate the fog of irrationalist obfuscation can also tempt one "to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture them in the name, and on behalf, of their 'real' selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man ...must be identical with his freedom-the free choice of his 'true', albeit often submerged and inarticulate, self." In the end, the ideal of positive liberty seemed to Berlin too dangerous-too arrogant and presumptuous, too prone to monism and "final solutions," too controlling and depersonalizing-to be endorsed.

Hence Berlin's preference for negative liberty, and the pluralism it engenders, as "a truer and more humane ideal than the goals of those who seek in the great, disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of 'positive' self-mastery."

Pluralism was, of course, the central political and social idea of Berlin's entire career. There are many goods in the world, he repeatedly asserted, and they are not necessarily in harmony with one another, or compatible with one another; indeed, they may even be mutually exclusive, without thereby ceasing to be good.

Libeliy exists in palpable tension with other goods such as equality, justice, happiness, security, and order. Therefore, a political order that grants the greatest possible scope to the full variety of human goods is preferable to an order that insists upon only one.

The consecrated life may represent a beautiful and noble ambition, perhaps the highest goal to which we can aspire as individual human beings. But not unless we feel inwardly called to it.

And it makes a very bad basis for a public philosophy.

"Two Concepts" remains, even,after nearly a half-century, a suggestive analysis, whose implications and ramifications extend far beyond the range of what Berlin himself could have possibly envisioned. His way of dividing up the concept of liberty proves to be remarkably congruent with the different strains of secular-

ism." egative" secularism, the secularism of non-establ ishment, has many of the same virtues as negative libelty-an openness to diverse perspectives, whether religious or nonreligious, a commitment to free inquiry, free expression, and free association, and a "freedom from" the coerciveness of any "official" perspective, including that of militant secularism.

By the same token, positive secularism, the secularism of established unbelief, proves to have many of the same pitfalls as positive liberty. In affirming the secular ideal as an ultimate and alternative comprehensive faith, "positive" secularism in effect embraces the ideal of self-mastery. In so doing, it also embraces an obligation to dispel the damaging misconceptions that prey on the minds of others, and to liberate them from the spell of priests, televangelists, and other purveyors of illusion. This will allow them to discover their "true selves," and help them along in the direction of greater and greater "autonomy." Whether this takes the form of coercion or not, the fact remains that "positive" secularism has all the features of a crusading ideal-the sort of ideal Berlin warned against.

Tn the penultimate paragraph of his essay, Berlin offered the words that form the culminating stroke in his defense of pluralism, but which also well express the importance of religious faith in human existence: "In the end, men choose between ultimate values; they choose as they do, because their life and thought are determined by fundamental moral categories and concepts that are, at any rate over large stretches of time and space, a part of their being and thought and sense of their own identity; part of what makes them human."

Berlin could hardly have offered a more apt account of the reasons why a vibrantly pluralistic religious life is the one most compatible with the fullest possible respect for the dignity of the human person. For what is religion ifnot the most powerful of all expressions of ultimate values? What "positive" secularizers have regarded with fear and contempt, or as a burden from which our "better selves" need liberation, the "negative" secularizer regards as an essential element in the warp and woof of our humanity. his understanding of two secularisms may help explain the paradoxical situation at the beginning of this essay, in which secularism seems at one and the same time both victor and vanquished. In a sense, both asseliions are true. Americans have by and large accepted negative secularism as an essential basis for peaceful coexistence in a religiously pluralistic society. Any large-scale religious revivalism or enthusiasm the United States is likely to see in the years to come will have accepted the prior restraint that negative secularism imposes as a precondition of its very existence. Indeed, a well-considered theological basis for respecting the "others" who lie outside one's own tradition will be essential to any religion hoping to have a public presence. Religious activity and expression will likely continue to grow, further eroding the rule of positive secularism-but it will do so largely within the container of a negative-secularist

Suhas Nimbalkar White, Black and Red 1997, auylic on canvas, /22 x147 em.

understanding of "the world." The return of religious faith is not likely to be a fearsome "return of the repressed," at least not in the United States.

It follows, however, that religious faiths must undergo some degree of adaptation in accommodating themselves to negative secularism. To begin with, they must, as it were, learn how to behave around strangers. But there is more to it than that. The key question adherents must ask is whether such an adaptation represents a compromise of their faith, or a deepening and clarifying of it. The answer may be surprising to those who think only in terms of the "warfare of science and religion," or the final triumph or final defeat of positive secularism, and who assume that all adaptation is mere trimming or acculturation. The problem may pose insuperable obstacles to intransigent religious outlooks, with a rigid or poorly developed understanding of "the world" and of its relationship to the ultimate. They will be quite understandably resistant to an adaptation that would concede any authority to "the world."

But that need not be universally the case. Speaking for a moment only of the Christian faith, the effects of such adaptation would seem to be largely positive, and an impOt1ant example of what theologian John Henry Newman called a "development of doctrine." It would serve to remind Christians of something they sometimes lose sight of-that their faith affirms the world. Not as an absolute good, sufficient unto itself. Not as an exclusive focus for their energies. And not as the ultimate audience before which the drama oftheir lives is played. But as a very great good nonetheless, a world whose goodness and order are inherent, since it is a world understood to be endowed by a Creator God with harmony, beauty, intelligibility, and commodity that have not been entirely erased by the effects of sin. Even the most unregenerate of that world's inhabitants still bear the imago Dei, and all are beneficiai-ies of what is called "common grace," which means that they remain fully capable of the finest acts of nobility, justice, love, and wisdom. It is not only an observable fact but a

theologically sustainable truth that admirable qualities of mind and soul are not the exclusive property of one's coreligionists, and are not withheld from the nonbelieving artist, thinker, or politician.

Therefore, the quality of mind we call "humanism' should not be seen as the sinister offspring of a positive secularism, but the lively child of a negative secularism, one that takes a soberly affirmative view of the natural potential inherent in human reason and imagination. "It is vital," writes the cultural critic Ken Myers, that Christians "not regard art or science or the humanities to be evangelism carried out by other means." Nor, one might add, should complete withdrawal into gnostic otherworldliness, or any other form of extreme renunciation, be a collective goal.

Instead, argues Myers, the purpose of these human pursuits, like the purpose of government and politics, is "simply to maintain fallen yet rich human life on the planet." Even Jesus' command to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" represents a real commitment by the Christian to the legitimacy of even the most unbelieving political rulers, and therefore the intrinsic worthiness and dignity, from the Christian perspective, of the worldly task of political governance. et from this follows a final observation, which I fear may run the risk of restoring some of the knotty complexity I have tried to unravel. Given negative secularism's implicit respect for the world on its own terms, is it not necessary that we be prepared to endorse some set of normative standards inherent in nature-inherent limits and boundaries from which negative secularism derives its sense of the world's beauty, orderliness, regularities, and moral economy? And, to go to the heart of the matter, how much longer can it be meaningful to speak ofthe liberty of the individual person, when we are rapidly approaching the point where that liberty is taken to include the sovereign right to do whatever one wants with the human body and mind, including the comprehensive genetic or pharmacological refashioning of both? Is the very concept of individual liberty even intelligible under such circumstances, unless we can preSW11esome measure of fixity and givenness in the person, and resistance in the medium in which he or she acts? Does the very concept of liberty evaporate when its triumph is too complete, just as a business firm becomes transformed into something different when it becomes a monopoly? Is there any reason powerful enough to persuade us not to tinker with that fixity, and thereby risk making ourselves into the first posthuman creatures-any reason, that is, other than the Judeo-Christian understanding of the human person as a created being whose dignity and fundamental characteristics are a divine endowment from that Creator? Where, in the traditions of either form of secularism, does one find an adequate defense against such temptation?

Such questions not only take us even further away from positive secularism. They also may force us to reconsider the necessity of something resembling a religious establishment. They suggest the possibility that a decent and sustainable secularism

cannot ever exist entirely as a nonestablished order, i.e., without the assumption of an orderly and given world undergirding it.

This is not just a matter of the need for some kind of social and political axioms and norms. It is also a matter of having the right axioms-axioms that provide a coherent idea of what it means to be a human person. For without something like the JudeoChristian conception of the created order superintending the works of secular society, and the notion that the individual person has an inviolable dignity simply because he or she is created by God, there may be no effective way of containing the powerful impulses that would work to undetmine that order. We see the first inklings of this possibility in the ease with which unexceptionable interventions, such as cosmetic surgery or the use of drugs to treat severe psychological disorders, blur into more questionable ones, such as gender alteration, the pharmacological remaking of the self, and the melding of species, with nary a bright line in sight to be drawn, except arbitrarily. Whether its proponents know it or not, the world-affirming work of secularism has always tacitly depended upon the givenness and ultimate rightness of an orderly nature, whose scope and majesty are too great to be entirely overcome by the human will. Paradoxically, belief in the existence of considerations beyond the world's reach has served to give the world its solidity, to underwrite the possibility of human dignity, and to discipline human will. Our dignity is in overcoming-and in not overcoming. What will take these considerations' place when all that was once solid is turned into clay of infinite malleability?

Berlin seemed to recognize something like this later in his life, that both positive and negative liberty must somehow be confined within a certain radius. He believed those confinements could be arrived at by entirely conventional means, and continued to the end to reject emphatically any notion of universally valid nOlms.

To have believed otherwise, he thought, would have violated his understanding of pluralism. But it may not be so easy for us. The weakest and most disappointing points in Berlin's work reliably come at those moments when he is forced to appeal to a vague traditional standard of "those principles that most people have accepted for a very long time," rather than commit the unpardonable sin of proclaiming an absolute. He perhaps could not see the extent to which his rather English reliance upon the residuum of Western cultural practice as a counterweight to liberty-and by extension, to secularism-made presumptions that we can no longer presume, and no longer rely upon. Berlin resisted monism, the tyranny of the one truth. But perhaps he needed to be more skeptical of his own skepticism, just as one needs always to be moderate in one's moderation. At the beginning of a new century, it now seems that even negative secularism may need to fall back on stronger stuff than mere convention if it is to survive and thrive.

0 About the holds the University essay at a the Wilson

Author: Wilfi'ed M McClay, aformer Wilson Center Fellow, Sun Trust Chair of Excellence in the Humanities at the of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He presented a version of this conference on the role of religion in American public life at Center last year.

â&#x20AC;˘ On this untamed stretch of central California coastline, d reamers and dropouts have claimed a corner of parad ise

__________ Left: At their oceanedge garden, Kate Healey and daughter Isabella gather herbs from a one-hectare plot.

Right: Suspended infog, a cabin hangsfrom a cliff at Esalen.

Healing arts specialists are drawn to the institute.

9f

h;peoPle who live in the Big Sur country divide the peopie who drop off Highway I to see them into two distinctly identifiable categories.

There are the tourists, who complain that there are no telephones or televisions in the motel rooms and who say, as they wait at the gas pump, Where exactly is all this wonderful scenery everyone keeps talking about, all I see is trees.

And there are the visitors, who stand and look around, and after a while they see a wisp of white fog coming up a dark gully as a faint mixed scent of kelp and yerba buena floats through the air. Or there is a giant condor circling overhead, or a sea otter scraping mussels off a rock in the spray on the beach at the foot of a 300-meter cliff, or a whale spouting out

"If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes: Perhaps of my planted forest a few May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast of cypress, haggard With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.

Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant. "

Poet Robinson Jeffers, who arrived in Big Sur in 1914, handbuilt his Hawk Tower (opposite) of boulders eroded ji-om the cliffs. The towel; part of Tor House. was built as a refuge for his ,vife and a place for their children to play.

in the endless Pacific, and they say, There is something magic about this place.

"Magic," which used to be a severe technical term, is now an all-purpose word meaning anything distinctly out of the ordinary. And as such, it is a perfectly accurate descriptive word for Big Sur. There is nothing precisely like it on this planet.

Everyone who has ever got beyond the tourist stage on this narrow 120-kilometer stretch of central California coast, running just south of Monterey to Carmel, and nearly to San Simeon, has at some time had the feeling, exhilarating or uneasy or simply puzzled, of being on an edge. The Ohlone Indians, who lived just north of here for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, have left behind them a song of which the refrain is "Dancing on the edge of the world."

You find yourself always on the edge in Big Sur, on the edge of cliffs plunging down into the sea, on the edge of California where the bungalows and the billboards stop at last, on the edge of the United States, where the bustling contrapuntal progress of the American dream

bangs head-on into the angry monotony of the Pacific Ocean.

Geologically speaking, the Big Sur country is not part of the United States at all. It is the cutting edge of the Pacific Tectonic Plate, one of the dozen or so components of the current crust of planet Earth, which for the past 29 million years has been grinding its way northwestward against the edge of the North American Plate, causing fearful landslides and earthquakes as it goes, at approximately the speed of a growing human fingernail.

No wonder that the land bears evelywhere the imprint of chaos, rock layers twisted and bent like the limbs ofphotographer Edward Weston's cypress, the kind of tree that "the sailor wind works into deepsea knots," says the poet Robinson Jeffers. o wonder there is an extraordinaty jumble of vegetation here: redwood from the damp nOlihern forests growing across the hill from yucca of the southern deserts, tan oak and sycamore and willow and big-leaf maple and madrona, and the Santa Lucia fir, which is found nowhere else on eatih, all packed together like riders in a subway

(one authority has counted 344 species of tree and shrub and grass squeezed into one patch of 1,500 hectares). Nowhere else will you see such a range ofthe color green in a nan'ow strip of landscape, from the pale absinthe of denuded hilltops to the terrible dark of cliffside gorges.

The climate here is technically known as Mediterranean, with wet winters and dry summers and reasonably moderate temperatures the year round, more pleasant than the Mediterranean itself because cold water rising out of offshore sea canyons thousands of feet deep breeds fogs-which tends to annoy the tourists.

But the fogs also temper the summer heat and help keep down the fires that periodically threaten to destroy every living thing between the mountaintops and the sea.

It is a richly tormented landscape that never was, and never will be, fit for largescale human habitation. And for all but a brief recent flicker of time, sensible humans have carefully avoided it.

Anyone who has ever come to Big Sur, says Esther Ewoldsen, whose grandfather established a homestead here more than a

centUly ago, has been running away from something, whether the law or their family or their creditors. The Esselen Indians retreated here 2,000 years ago, forced to share the game of the rugged contryside with the grizzly bears, and the limpets and mussels clinging for dear life to the tidal

rocks, with the pelicans. In colonial days, when it was known as el pais grande del sur, "the big country of the south," meaning the inaccessible stretch of coast south of the provincial capital of Alta California at Monterey, it was a dark trackless wilderness, where outlaws hid out from

service in the armed forces of Spain and Mexico, as draft-dodgers would later hide out from the American Army during the Vietnam War. Smugglers quartered here, and trappers like Jedediah Smith, who, after they had exterminated the beavers from the Rocky Mountain country for the European hat trade, came here to hunt the sea otters prowling the coastal waters.

(Those creatures were to be saved from being exterminated themselves only by the spread of false rumors that they were already extinct.)

For a brief period toward the end of the 19th centUlY,there was some logging of tan oaks to provide tannic acid for the leather trade, some gold mining, some quarrying of limestone, but nothing remains of them except a few scars on the landscape.

Adventurous voyagers might drop by, like Robert Louis Stevenson, who used the scenery as a backdrop for the tale of Treasure Island, which he was making up for his stepson. A few hardy souls got their .

65 hectares under the Homestead Act of 1862 and tried with difficulty to make a living by farming or ranching on what small amoUl1ts of relatively level grow1d were available among all the cliffs and an路oyos.

It was still a lost world when the young poet Robinson Jeffers came down to Big Sur with his bride, Una, in 1914. There was no paved road on the 6O-kilometer stretch from Monterey to the tiny village of Big Sur, and it took all day to cover it in a horse-drawn coach. A quarter-century later he wrote of this journey: "There had already been strong storms that winter and at Soberanes Creek the cypress trees around the farmhouse were blown to pieces. Sea-lions roared on the Lobos Rocks off shore, while the man of the house told us that last night his hundred-pound grindstone, which he kept by the back door, had been blown around the house to the front steps; here it lay. In the gorge of Mill Creek we changed horses, near a lonely farmhouse where an eightyyear-old man lay dying, he was dying hard, he had been dying for a week. On a magnificent hillside opposite a mountain-peak stood a comparatively prosperous farmhouse, apple trees behind it, and the man who lived there had killed his father with

Left: Vertiginous green hills pfunging to the sea remain the dramatic, defining elements of a rugged landscape that has drawn wanderers here since time beyond history.

Right: Holly Fassett, her daughter and granddaughte/; all three accomplished artists, gather in the family cabin, which once belonged to Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth.

rat-poison and married his stepmother.

There were only five or six inhabitants in forty miles, but each one had a story. We came down to the Sur River, and passed the albino redwood that still grows there, shining in the forest darkness, shoots of snowwhite foliage growing from the stump of a lightning-struck tree: not a human story, but strange enough to be."

All of what was to be the world of the Jeffers poetry was there, the awesome scenelY, the melodramatic tales of the tom and twisted souls stranded in it, the sense of a brooding danger, the sense, above all, that this was the end, the final point in both time and space of Western civilization.

Jeffers was to be the harbinger and bard for the still-continuing wave of runaways to hit Big Sur, the refugees from the materialistic, consumeristic culture of modern America.

In his daily life, Jeffers was a handsome, charming and talented man. He left a physical monument in the form of his house and looming tower. He built the tower by hand, by himself, out of huge boulders eroded from the cliffside by the giant waves that daily crash against the shore. From the beginning, it has been a shrine for his admirers, who in his lifetime ranged from Charlie Chaplin and Charles Lindbergh to George Gershwin and

Aldous Huxley, who saw him as a reincarnation ofthe ancient Greek tragedians.

It was meant to stand in magnificent isolation, dominating acres of wild land beside the pounding sea, but it is now just one more dwelling among many behind hedges on a quiet street in what has now become the tasteful, gallery-rich community of Carmel-by-the-Sea. Visitors file through it in silence as they file through museums: they see the room in the tower where the poet paced to the sullen beat of the waves as he composed his lines.

"Walk on gaunt shores and avoid the people" was his advice to the world. And Jeffers enjoyed the company of his con-

temporaries, heirs to the Romantic tradition, who turned their backs on it all.

Those poets and painters of the San Francisco Bay region, by the opening of the 20th century, found themselves strangling in the conformist and hypocritical atmosphere in what had once been the wide-open world of the forty-niners. (As late as 1946, my friend C.F. McIntyre, translator of French poets, was, or so he recounted, fired from the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley because he insisted on wearing a beret.)

Led by George Sterling, the poet laureate of San Francisco, they built themselves little cabins or houses in the wasteland near the ruins of the 18th-century Carmel mission.

Life in Carmel might be noisily cheerful-one of its chroniclers refers to it as a perpetual beach party-but there was always an undertow of dissatisfaction. As the critic Van Wyck Brooks, who spent a year with all the geniuses at Carmel, observed, nobody ever seemed to get any work done. And several of their leading figures, including Sterling and his wife, ended by swallowing the cyanide tablets they carried everywhere in their pockets-a practice made fashionable by a poet named Nora May French, who prepared a poisoned sandwich for a man who had spurned her love-but a dog got it first, and she swallowed the rest of the powder out of sheer spite.

While the scattered shacks, put up as so many temples to Art, were soon to be swallowed up by galloping suburbanization, all the coastline to the south still remained a wasteland, with only a few gruff loners willing to settle down on the edges of cliffs or up in the deep, damp dark of gorges.

Then, in the early 1920s, the state of California, empowered to build a road for potential defense purposes, and just perhaps suspecting that it had a tourist mecca on its hands, began to construct Highway 1 along the cliff edges, over bridges spanning the torrents, through the groves, skirting the steep mountain meadows. They used convict labor for the job, and it was hard work. The road was not finished for 16 years, and then the Depression and World War II, with its gas rationing, took people's

minds off the scenic coast of central California. Electricity and telephone lines were slow to follow. It was not until 1958 when William Randolph Hearst's castle of San Simeon was opened to the public that the great flood of tourist vehicles that had been anticipated began to flow along Highway I. Hearst had once planned, and had sent out intermediaries, to buy all the private property in the Big Sur country. He intended to make it into a vast estate, on the order of William the Conqueror's New Forest, where he could lead cavalcades of celebrity guests and retainers from one hunting camp to another, but he ran out of funds. Other, less ambitious, immigrants were meanwhile slipping in, people who had felt the lure of this distant, isolated land: rich people looking for quiet vacation homes, veterans looking to escape their memories of war, Hollywood people looking for hideaways, artistic people looking for secret places where their genius could flower, ordinary people looking for jobs as carpenters or waitresses, loners and drifters and derelicts looking for a quiet cleft or cranny outside the whirring machine of American life, every one of them looking for something different, out of tbe ordinary, magic.

Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, dri: ving along Highway 1, fell in love with and bought a little log cabin on a ledge with spectacular views of ocean and mountain. They never found time to come back, and the cabin eventually came into the hands of a man named Bill Fassett who had drifted his way all across the country from Tennessee. He would eventually expand it into what became a restaurant, which he called Nepenthe, a Greek word that can be translated into the vernacular as "no sorrow."

Nepenthe would soon become, as it has remained ever since, the social and symbolic center of the Big Sur country life.

"There was dancing every night in those days," says Fassett's daughter Holly, now matriarch of the clan still running the place. "And such friendly, unusual people.

Of course, when some of them started throwing tables at each other, I had to eighty-six them. But mostly it was just eat

and drink, talk and dance, dance dance dance all night long."

The most notable ofthe new immigrants was Henry Miller-bunked down for a while in one of the road-building convicts' cabins-who had turned up broke in America after achieving fame in Paris as the most banned of all authors. His Tropic of Cancer, that marvelously high-spirited chronicle of fraternity-boy sex on the Left Bank, first printed in 1935, had been greeted by Ezra Pound with the memorable sound bite, "At last an unprintable book that is fit to read." For many years, that title was to provide American customs officers with ample employment on the docks of New York, searching the baggage of returning voyagers for copies of the vile work disguised in innocent wrappers as the work of Hans Christian Andersen or Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen. It was not until 1961 that a memorable judiciary decision enabled works of fiction like Tropic of Cancer, dealing matter-of-factly with sex, to get back into the mainstream of literature where they had swum in the days of Chaucer and Boccaccio.

Royalties made Miller a rich man before he died in 1980. But he had not .come to Big Sur to make money. He had come, like the outlaws of old, to live in simple comfort in an earthly paradise unencumbered by the complicated responsibilities and conflicts of modern life.

He had a wonderful time. It was "one big party," in the summing up of Ephraim Doner, an artist who was an indefatigable companion in those days.

Henry Miller spent his whole life creating in more than 250 books and tens of thousands of letters a character called Henry Miller who was a wild man, a rebel, a subverter and perverter of all standards, codes and conformities, waging a war to the death against modern civilization and especially the American form of it, which he described in a book called The AirConditioned Nightmare. He was a genial, gentle, gregarious man, the greatest man there ever was to have a series of drinks with. He had a unique talent for depending on the kindness of strangers and friends to take care of him, and for generously repaying them when he had the time and the cash

Novelist Hemy Millel; here with his fourth wife, Eve, lived in Big Sur for 18 years.

in his pockets. He discovered in Big Sur what Alexander Solzhenitsyn would discover in a village in Vermont: a community of independent, self-reliant people who reminded him of Daniel Boone and Abraham Lincoln, people going their own individual, sometimes eccentric way, who would not dream of meddling in the affairs of their neighbors, but would do anything to help them out in an emergency.

Among them he had 18 sybaritic years.

After the daily long hours at his desk-he was a speed typist who could and did turn out thousands upon thousands of words a day-there were always the hot baths or Nepenthe to go to, and endless jolly conversations with the endless succession of neighbors, old fJ-iendsfrom Europe, young admirers from America, wives, aspiring writers, wild girls of the road, and curious tourists who found the way up the tortuous dirt road that led to his house on Partington Ridge.

Eventually, though, he repaired to the tony Los Angeles suburb of Pacific Palisades, where he would spend the last 18 years of his life ensconced in a columned and porticoed mansion, complete with heated swimming pool and air conditioning.

This is hardly a vision shared by the other inhabitants of Big Sur who, ever since the opening of Highway 1, have spent a good palt of their time fighting to keep out developers and other forces of progress that would turn them into a Pacific Pal isades. An impossible dream, but one that has been more successful than might have been foretold.

Tucked away in big houses in leafy glens or on rocky promontories, there grew up a little kernel of rich and famous and powerful people, patrician diplomats like Nicholas Roosevelt, famous architects like Nathaniel Owings and Philip Johnson, Nobel Prize winners like Linus Pauling, show business celebrities like Kim Novak and Allen Funt, creator of Candid Camera, billionaires like Ted Turner and David Packard. And these were people whose voice could carry as far as the California State Legislature, which in the 1960s and '70s passed laws protecting the scenic beauty of Highway 1 and providing that no buildings could be visible from the Big Sur section of the road.

And so, to this day, you can drive all the miles of two-lane highway through the narrow valleys or on the edge of the coastal cliffs without seeing a single billboard or movie theater or shopping mall or golf course.

It is still the kind of place where you can live for years without attracting too much curiosity or attention, where one man did live quietly for years and was regarded as a good neighbor, till someone saw his picture on television, where he was identified as being wanted for murder.

Apart from the highway, there still are only a few paved roads; for one stretch of 50 kilometers or so, there is no electric power except from solar collectors and a handful of generators. The hawks and kingfishers are still around, and muscular

jays will steal your hamburger if you aren't watchful. On any night you may find a mountain lion come down to sniffat your door. Lupine and poppies gaily carpet the mountain meadows.

Only a few purists worry about the intrusion of alien animals and plants.

They denounce the wild pigs (impolted in the 1920s from Europe for hunting purposes) for digging up vegetation that had remained largely undisturbed since the Santa Lucia Mountains rose out of the sea two million years ago; and "foreign weeds" like pampas grass, impolted from South America as a decorative plant, for aggressively displacing the more quiet native flowers.

(It is easier to sympathize with the complaints against another immigrant, genista, or French broom, a plant much prized for its yellow flowers by tourists who are unaware that this fast-growing weed pushes up past the slower-growing poison oak, the most common shrub in California, and absorbs some of its essential oil on the way, with the result that picking nosegays for your beloved may leave you covered for weeks with agonizing sores.)

Saving the physical presence was only half the battle. The question remained, how to preserve the spiritual essence of the place, the sense of the pristine, the primitive, the lawless, the wild? With a million cars carrying curious sightseers up and down the highway each year, it was impossible to prevent a transformation of Big Sur society. Where once the independent cuss was the norm, now a good 75 percent of the population (which varies with the seasons between l,500 and 2,000; the coastal Indians are said to have numbered 1,200 at their peak) is dependent on the tourist trade, or hospital ity industry as it is now called-cooks, waiters, bartenders, chambermaids, clerks in gift shops and art galleries, designers, photographers, park rangers. With the acute shortage of housing and with rents at Manhattan levels, some of them have to commute 80 kilometers and more to their work.

And to keep up with the times, this community is wired. Many people who used to own vacation homes, which they occupied for a few weeks and rented out the rest of

the year, have discovered that computers allow them to conduct their business from their living rooms. They go to the city on occasion to sign contracts.

There are still some folks of the old school-no one knows exactly how many-who live more or less anonymously in ramshackle structures in the woods, on land they bought when it was worth about a hundredth of one percent of what it would bring today.

Orrin Winton, one of the hardy band of year-round unauthorized campers-he was the one who found in a trackless canyon the bones of a girl hiker who had been missing for three years, but he didn't notify anyone of his discovery for five months because he doesn't like his privacy to be intruded on-could until recently be seen occasionally plugging his laptop into the pay phone beside the post office.

There, he accesses his Website, devoted to his family genealogy and to the subject of antenna design for amateur radio operators. He sees himself as a last stand against both the state authorities and the private enterprise system, which he feels are ganging up against the dropout.

The Forest Service will not authorize anyone to live in the woods for more than two weeks; restaurant owners will no longer leave their garbage where it can be picked over in dumpsters. Orrin Winton has, however, lived successfully alone in the wilderness, equipped with an allweather plastic-coated tent, a pair of sleeping bags, a propane stove and a .22-caliber gun, for the past seven-and-a-halfyears.

The freezing out of the dropouts has made for a quieter, gentler and somewhat more conventional Big Sur. There is still dancing at Nepenthe, but only once a month. There are still artists and artisans in Big Sur, scores of them, but they no longer live in shacks without refrigerators or running water and peddle their wares to motorists on the highway. They have studios, some of them very elaborate studios, and they sell their works in galleries. You can view their works in venues as various as the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies and the George Bush Presidential Library.

There is a certain nostalgia for the wild old days of 30 and 40 years ago, which

began up in San Francisco, where visions The house and grounds of Tor House, of Henry Miller, the wild prophet of sex where Robinson Jeffers wrote his major works. Once settled, the couple spent and anarchy, mingled in the minds of restthe rest of their lives in this granite less young people with the knowledge sanctuary overlooking Carmel Bay. that there were no resident policemen down there, only a patrol car that drove through, going south early in the morning top land a few kilometers south of the village of Big Sur, including some hot and back north in the evening. They came in all shapes and sizes: Beat poets like springs that had cured indigenous Indians and pioneers of arthritis. He built Jack Kerouac, folksingers, high school bathhouses there with the idea of creatkids plotting revolution in Redwood City and Walnut Grove, deadbeats and petty ing a therapeutic spa. thieves of the type described at great From this point, fact erodes and legend length in a cult classic by Richard proliferates. As one story goes, when Brautigan called A Confederate General Ml}rphy heard that some young rowdies from Big Sur, all fleeing from the stifling . from San Francisco were coming down on standardized air of the commercial cul- moonlit nights for wild rompings, which were destroying his buildings and defacture, all singing the anthem of Woody ing the environment, he sent orders to the Guthrie, "This land belongs to you and caretaker of his house nearby. Murphy me." They spread up the creeks and through the forests, uprooting the "No instructed that fierce-looking young man from Missouri, who happened to be Trespassing" signs, chopping down trees named Hunter S. Thompson, to get rid for their campfires, bedding down under of them. Thompson armed himself with the stars in fields of poison oak or in abandoned cars, in continuous celebration of a shotgun, formed a posse, including folksinger Joan Baez and two Doberman drink, drugs, sex, Zen, liberty, folk music, pinschers, and went up one midnight rock music and everything else that came through the solitary trail that led to the hot under the general heading of Love.

The older inhabitants were outraged by springs. "They were plenty loud up there," says one of the purveyors of local the noise and the strewing of garbage; folklore, "but the Dobermans must have Henry Miller referred to all those disciples been louder, because when they got there, of his as "locusts." But it was those unruly there was nobody left, and they've never young people, not yet known as hippies, been since, though how they got away who would provide the publicity that without jumping 450 feet [about 140 would put Big Sur on the American map. meters] into the ocean nobody knows."

In the long run, says one of the motel ownAfter this Night of the Dobermans, ers, they ended up being good for business.

A Dr. Henry C. Murphy in Salinas (he Dr. Murphy came down to express his satisfaction, and found the walls and delivered the baby John Steinbeck) had ceilings of his home full of buckshot, purchased 65 hectares of wooded cliff-

and fired his caretaker.

In time, the property came into the hands of Dr. Murphy's grandson Michael and his Stanford classmate, Richard Price, both of them dissatisfied and disillusioned with the philosophies they had studied in the classrooms. They founded the Esalen Institute in 1962 to use the property around the hot springs to encourage alternative ways of understanding and experiencing the world.

Esalen, too, would enter the national consciousness as a symbol of highbrow counterculture. "A center for alternative education, a forum for transfonnational practices," it attracted people interested in radical change in their own lives, in their society, in the traditional thought patterns of the Western world. They came to meditate, to interact, to study the philosophies and practice the rites of Buddhists and shamans and medicine men and Jungian analysts. They came to hear Alan Watts proclaim that Western science was a sham, or to hear Timothy Leary summon路 them to "Turn On, Tune In and Drop Out." Life was on the wild side in the early days. There were folk festivals where 3,000 people might show up to hear songs like "Ballad of the South Coast." There was the time when a zany guy named Zebo, who turned up regularly on such occasions, picked up Lily Tomlin as she was performing and jumped with her into the pool. An alert operative noticed she was wired to a mike and might be electrocuted. So he slammed all the circuit breakers and saved the day.

Today Esalen is a quiet, more reflective place, "a polished academy," as one of the survivors of the Henry Miller days puts it petulantly. Old-timers say that the turning point came in 1980 when, during the first premonitions of the crack-up of the Communist empire, Esalen brokered an exchange between American and Soviet scholars and lecturers. Among those on the Soviet side was a minor apparatchik named Boris Yeltsin. It was felt that some of the unbridled goings-on on the cliffs of Big Sur might give the visitors a wrong idea of America, and severe restrictions were imposed on pubIic taking of controlled substances and on

public nudity outside the hot baths.

Esalen presents the picture of an Ivy League campus, spread across an exceptionally attractive stretch of woodland overlooking the Pacific.

Cheerfully earnest young students, with a smattering of graybeards, gravitate among workshops, study groups, seminars, meditative sessions, in such courses as "Awakening the Buddha Within," "Gestalt Process," "GoIL.An Exploration of the Deeper Game," "Reichian Energetics," "Solving Life's Serious Issues" and "Applied Shamanism." Instead of a revolution, they are seeking self-help, expanded horizons, a widened awareness.

It is a richly tormented landscape that never was fit for large-scale human habitation.

The hippies are long gone now, to die of overdoses or become associate professors in conventional colleges. The outcast figure who presaged their experimentation can be found in Jack Kerouac's Big Sur, with its remorselessly detailed account of how the King of the Beats came back to Big Sur to recover from the disillusionments of drunken middle age by reconnecting with the wilderness, and how he tried to resume the cheerful wild life of old, but sweet port wine dragged him down to self-loathing and despair and delirium tremens.

The gentrified quiet of Big Sur today no doubt would repel Kerouac. It continues to lure people with itching feet. They come from the ends of the earth, from backwoods or city, from northern Mexico or northern Idaho, and just as on the day when Jeffers took his first ride here in 1914, they all have their story to tell.

Strolling down Highway 1 between the library and the post office, you might run into "Tassi" Bob Robinson, once the youngest officer ever to command a ship in the Royal Australian Navy, who chanced to

take a trip down to Big Sm one day when his ship was visiting San Francisco Harbor.

He discovered a climate much like that of his native Tasmania but with a somewhat more lively social scene. He now runs a tourist compound that happens to boast the liveliest bar in the village.

Or it might be Magnus Toren, a Stockholm boy who, after seven years of fetching and delivering yachts in the South Seas, drifted somehow to Big Sur, married a flower child from Kansas and now directs the Henry Miller Library, where pilgrims come from all the continents.

Or it might be Jeff Norman, who lives so far up on a ridge it may take him an hour on foot and an hour by fom-wheel drive to get down to the village in good weather. A college dropout who came here 29 years ago and learned how to live in the wilderness, Norman went on to study by candlelight and is now a consulting biologist employed by government and private agencies in Big Sur to measure and regulate the environmental impact of any new construction. He is also widely acknowledged as an expelt on local history.

Or it might be a young woman from Appalachia, who was tJu'ee times throttled by her father to the point of coma, but went on to become a junior executive at a major corporation. She has now come to Esalen to leaJJI if there isn't something more important in life than building better computers.

It is a quiet, prosperous, laid-back place. But there remains that touch of uncertainty, of distant danger in the air.

Any heavy rain, and the rain can be heavy, sets people to asking if it will provoke one of those giant mudslides or rockslides that every 10 years or so drag parts of Highway 1 into the ocean, cutting off the whole community from the rest of California for weeks or even months at a time. And a low rumble from the west is a reminder that frothing waves are biting away 8,000 times a day at the cliffs on which the pleasure domes of Big Sur stand, while silently beneath it all el pais grande del sur continues its fingernailpaced slide toward doom.

D About the Author: Robert Wernick, afreelance writer based in Paris, regularly contributes to Smithsonian.

"J always heard you can't take it with you, so J decided to have it electronically transferred."

OF COURSE "M U~-

A PO~TAL WO~ BIT MfE. ...

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

Will genetic modification for fu n and profit become a homegrown industry?

Text by FRED HAPGOOD Photographs by JASON ODDY

here is one thing that corporations always understand," writes "Johnna Appleseed" in a communique issued by the anti biotechnology group Reclaim the Seeds, "and that is the bottom line.

Destroy their crops, equipment, buildings, vehicles and they get the point.. ..[I]f corporations, governments and universities have any relationship to biotechnology, they are targets .... lt's harvest time."

All around the world, activists-many of a more peaceful inclination than Ms. Appleseed, but equally motivated-are mobilizing to fight this new technology.

International trade agreements are imperiled by the worldwide crusade against bioengineered products. In July 1999, an equity analyst at Deutsche Bank threw up his hands and recommended a sell for the entire seed sector. "The perception wars are being lost by industry, one battle after another," he wrote, expressing a view that has since become very widely shared, "and there is little on the near-term horizon likely to [reverse the trend]."

We haven't seen anything like this since the anti-nuclearpower movement in the 1970s, and indeed the tactics and many of the rhetorical tropes-from the apocalyptic dimensions of the stakes ("farmageddon" is being proclaimed in some circles) to the perfidy of capital, the fecklessness and corruption of regulators, and the vision of stopping the technology in its tracks-are all lifted straight from the antinuke playbook. Even many of the actors, from Ralph Nader to the Union of Concerned Scientists, are the same.

In fact, though, these two technologies could hardly be more different. One way of assessing the social meaning of a technology is to plumb its pool of potential applications. Nuclear power plants make power, period; genetically engineered organisms are doing virtually everything or soon will be: They are cleaning air and water and concentrating minerals for the mining industries; they are being used as sensors, luminescing, for example, when

Preparing to run a polymerase chain reaction, making millions of copies of a DNA template.

In electrophoresis, negatively charged DNA is placed in an electrical field of 100 or more volts; it then migrates through the agarose medium toward the anode. Smaller pieces of DNA move more easily and quickly, and the molecules are thus separated according to size.

Leji: Petri dishes and culture tubes are refrigerated to slow bacterial growth and preserve the cells until the moment is ripe for experimentation.

Ajier electrophoresis, separated DNA in agarose gels (below) having been stained (and, in this case, overstained) with ethidium bromide, is visualized on an ultraviolet transilluminatOl~

some change is detected in their environment; they are being developed to produce specialty materials (new woods and biodegradable plastics), fabrics (such as industrially useful amounts of spider silk -being called BioSteel-expressed in the milk of genetically modified goats), and oils and lubricants. The Iist of gardening applications-fluorescing blooms, longer flowering seasons, low-light adaptations-fills every gardener's wish list.

And of course all these uses of genetic modification pale in significance beside its well-publicized and controversial food appl ications, which are also potentially almost countless: modifying plants to resist pests, to increase photosynthesis or resistance to spoilage, to add nutrients and vaccines or subtract allergens, toxins,

or carcinogens, to increase tolerance for poor soils or pesticides or high salinity or harsh climates or crowding ... .! won't even start in on the possibi Iities open to "bioartists" who might want to "raise issues."

As impressive as the current state of the art is, moreover, the technology's fundamental capabilities are on a rapidly rising curve. Biotech today still involves working with naturally existing genes, but techniques are being developed to produce novel genes that have no natural representatives. One method is to generate huge numbers of mutations randomly and then sift through them; another is to combine parts of genes from several species into a single portmanteau gene. The next step-programming genes directly, the way we do computers-is still years off, but is being looked at seriously.

Nor is genetic programmability the limit, by any means.

Several labs are working on controlling and manipulating a wide range of reactions within cells themselves. One common aim in this research is to find ways of developing biological computers that would be maintained inside cells and yet be programmable from outside.

Cellular computers would give us very flexible control over the nature and operation of their synthetic machinery. You do not have to go very far down this road before you arrive at a general-purpose, self-replicating molecular assembler-a tool that is to atoms what a computer's processor is to bits, and one that works at a cost that can be measured out in tablespoons of vegetable bouillon. In short, this technology is potentially as versatile as computer programming, relevant to just about every industrial and cultural sector.

Biotech differs just as radically from nuclear power in the cost of doing business. This useful number-what economists call "entry cost"-tells you much about who is going to use a technology and why, how and by whom it will be regulated, and what role it will play in our lives. The entry cost of nuclear power is in the billions of dollars; in plant biotechnology, the cost in required materials and equipment is next to nothing. In shot1, this is the kind of field that invites casual exploration-a field where ideas that come while a person is in the shower or stuck in traffic can be experimented with fairly easily.

This point is easily missed because the news we get about biotech lends to focus on cutting-edge developments. Maintaining a world-class research lab is indeed expensive-but the cost of replicating and applying the results of such research con-

stantly declines: Instruments get both cheaper and more powerful, lab procedures get codified into paint-by-number textbook protocols, and more genes get sequenced and published.

One way to get a feel for this cost trajectory is to page through the back of Science magazine, looking at the ads of labs competing to make genetic sequences to your specification: 75 cents a base; 60 cents a base; 49 cents a base. The intensity of this price competition reflects the low entry cost.

Or you could check out the equipment catalog of Edvotek, a company that sells biotechnology-related educational suppLies (www.edvotek.com). I went through their offerings on a mental shopping spree, picking out everything I thought 1 might need in order to set up a home lab, and I came up with a total bill of $10,000. When 1 was through, 1 called Edvotek's Chairman, Jack G. Chirikjian, to ask him what else I might need. "Ten thousand dollars!" he exclaimed, seemingly exasperated at my yuppie self-indulgence .. "You don't need to spend more than $3,500."

Or, if you're really strapped for cash, you could consult a series of 1998 at:ticles in Scientific American's wonderful "Amateur Scientist" column, which tell you how to build many of the basic tools for biotechnology yourself.

Besides materials and equipment, there are of course information costs, but information gets onto the Internet-and from there, it goes everywhere. What makes the effect of this information-sharing especially powerful is the intrinsic interrelatedness ofliving things-it appears likely, for example, that apples and oranges, which symbolize the very idea of mutual difference, will turn out to share some 90 percent of their genomes when these are mapped. Discoveries coming out of work on, say, the growth rate of potatoes may well be applicable to onions or grains or apples. Once a gene is transplanted into a single plant variety, classical breeding techniques can be used to spread it to all the varieties in that species. And if the development technology is cheap, the distribution technology-seed-well, grows on trees.

Technologies like this are autocatalytic, or self-accelerating: As the first scientists to develop them write articles, hold conferences, and invent tools, it becomes progressively easier for others to follow and build on their work. And the effects are cumulative-for example, the number of USDA-authorized field plantings of genetically modified crops grew on a rising curve from a

But the problem with denying the total of21 by the end of 1988 to 5,375 truth is not just that it is bound to by the end of 1999. come out, but that time is being lost What biotech's low costs mean, iotechnology's critics that could be used to find real soluamong other things, is that far from tions to problems that are simply not being cartelized by multinational are reluctant to face or going to go away. For instance, the agribusinesses, it is likely to be their admit the probability that a concern that genetically engineered undoing. Large companies need to be general ban on the whole organisms will escape into the wild able to control their market exposure; seems more than plausible-it seems field is impossible to their bets are too big to sustain signifistone inevitable, sooner or later. Not cant risk. In low-cost technologies, enforce, while the industry very many such escapees are likely to like software writing or fashion design is reluctant to concede survive, being handicapped by whator crafts of any kind, new talent or ever assignment we bred into themideas can pop up at any time and alter that biotech is already but a handful might. If there is no the market unpredictably. largely uncontrollable. chance of controlling such events by Biotech is doubly inhospitable to preventive regulation, the best alterlarge companies because its products native may be to start developing the are self-replicating, which raises extremely knotty intellectual-property protection issues. Some ef- science necessary to send genetically modified organisms out after other GMOs-to engineer microbial organisms to infect fort has been put into creating a sterile-seed technology-what has been dubbed terminator genes-that would prevent genetiand debilitate specific alien species or strains, for example.

The great advantage of such research is that it would be readily cally modified crops from replicating; but, as the software industry well knows, it always costs more to put copy protection in applicable to a much more urgent struggle now being waged in than to strip it out. It's not clear how long it would take someone every region of the globe against existing "exotics"-species that are introduced, intentionally or otherwise, or that invade from to figure out how to inhibit a terminator gene-but it would almost certainly take less time than was needed to design it. other ecologies. The growing list of habitats thus destroyed, jobs lost, and species overwhelmed and extinguished already makes the In these circumstances, the best hope for the biotech corporations may actually lie in the efforts of their activist-opponents to direct plausible ecological effects of biotech-gone-wrong pale by have huge upfront testing costs imposed on them, albeit with the comparison. Conventional defenses against exotic species have ultimate goal of stopping them in their tracks-for such a regulahad scarcely any effect, and the few victories that have been won tory burden would import into this sector precisely the kind of are in danger of being reversed at any time.

Yet so far as I know, no one of stature in the biotech sector has cost barrier to entry that is presently missing. This common cause between big capital and the activists is well known inside the in- called for such research, either as a tool for resisting the spread dustry, but it isn't much talked about. of exotics or as a defense against any accidental release of GMOs. Instead, the sector has contented itself with throwing Biotechnology's critics are reluctant to face or admit the probability that a general ban on the whole field is impossible to en- sand on studies suggesting that such events could happen-or force, while the industry is reluctant to concede that biotech is might already have.

This defensiveness and leadership deficit may be traced to one already largely uncontrollable, because that revelation might key assumption of the debate: that biotech can be controlled. The well unsettle the public. When I posted a query about "garage fear seems to be that if the argument goes against biotech, then the biotech" to a professional mailing list on the Internet, I received logic of control might be used to throttle the industry back or even the following reprimand from an executive: shut it down. To argue for the design and release of ecological antibodies is to admit that this technology cannot be stoppedArticles [that] ...suggest that much is easily do-able even though such is already almost undoubtedly the case. (and it is) for little money (and it is) ...can't help but If both sides of the biotech debate could relinquish the falsely fire up the full spectrum of imaginations (the good, reassuring metaphysic of control, we could probably clean up the bad, and the ugly) ....Taking this activity ...into after the technology fairly well, if and when we need to. But to do garages is the last thing we ought to be doing if we that, we would need to start thinking about how to build want to continue to gain greater public acceptance. an ecological immune system-and preferably sooner, rather That it is being done, I have no doubt, but to directly than later.

D or indirectly "promote" it through articles would in my view be the height of irresponsibility, at least About the Author: Fred Hapgood is a Boston-based journalisl who writes on science and technology. for the foreseeable future.

Yale, the elder Bush took his wife, Barbara, and young son to West Texas, where he began his career in the oil business. Young George W. spent much of his childhood in Midland, Texas, and still thinks of it as his hometown. Young George was joined by a sister, Robin, in December 1949; the Bushes' third child, John (called "Jeb"), was born in February 1953. Only a few years after Jeb's birth, blood tests showed that Robin had advanced leukemia, a disease that is often curable now but about which little was known back then. Robin died that October at the age of three.

His sister's death was a devastating experience for young George W. "I was sad, and stunned," he says in A Charge to Keep. "I knew Robin had been sick, but death was hard for me to imagine.

Minutes before, I had a little sister, and .now, suddenly, I did not. Forty-six years later, those minutes remain the starkest memory of my childhood, a sharp pain in the midst of an otherwise happy blur."

Three more children were born to the Bushes in West Texas-Neil in 1955, Marvin in 1956, and Dorothy in 1959.

Soon after Dorothy was born, her father moved the family to Houston, in the southeastern corner of the state, where he took over operations of an offshore oil-drilling company he had helped to found. George W. had just finished the seventh grade at San Jacinto Junior High in Midland and had been elected class president for the following year. His family's move meant he had to leave this familiar school for a private academy, Kinkaid School, in a Houston suburb.

In the fall of 1961, George Bush's parents sent him to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, one of the country's most prestigious college preparatory schools and his father's alma mater. He went there as a 15-year-old boy who had never lived away from home, who was far more used to the wide-open landscapes of the Southwest than to the wooded hills of the Northeast. But he adjusted. "Andover taught me how to think," Bush has said, and added he developed a lifelong interest in history, inspired by his history teacher.

"He taught me that history brings the past

1. Three generations of the Bushfamity.

Seated in the center are President George W Bush's paternal grandparents, Prescott Bush, who served as senator pom Connecticut fi-om 1952 to 1963, and his wife, Dorothy Walker Bush. A boyish George W Bush stands at the far left next to his parents. 2. George W Bush (right) in 1956 with parents George and Barbara Bush at their home in Midland, Texas. Also shown here are younger brothers (/i-om the top) Neil, Jeb and Marvin.

and its lessons to life, and those lessons can often help predict the future."

After graduating from Andover in 1964, Bush went to Yale University in Connecticut, where he concentrated on traditional activities. He was elected president of his fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and continued to pursue his love for sports. Baseball remained his favorite, but, he says, "my talent never matched my enthusiasm."

George W. graduated from Yale in May of 1968 with a major in history. Two weeks before graduation, he went to the offices of the Texas Air National Guard at Ellington Air Force Base outside Houston to sign up for pilot training. One motivation, he said, was to learn to fly, as his father had done during World War n.

George W. was commissioned as a second lieutenant and spent two years on active duty, flying F-102 fighter interceptors.

For almost four years after that, he was on a part-time status, flying occasional mis-

sions to help the Air National Guard keep two of its F-102s on round-the-clock alert.

During this period,- George W. worked for a former partner of his father's, who had left the oil-drilling business to stati an agricultural company in Houston that had interests in a wide variety of things, from cattle and chickens to tropical plants.

George's job was to travel around the United States and to countries in Central America looking for plant nurseries his company might want to acquire. In 1972, he left this job and went to Alabama to work on the unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign of Republican Winton Blount.

Returning to Houston, he became a counselor for African-American youngsters in a program that brought together volunteers from the athletic, entertainment, and business worlds to work with young people in a variety of ways. It gave Bush, he says, "a glimpse of a world I had never seen. It was tragic, heartbreaking, and uplifting, all at the same time. I saw a lot of povelty. I also saw bad choices: drugs, alcohol abuse, men who had fathered children and walked away, leaving single mothers struggling to raise children on their own. I saw children who could not read and were way behind in school. I also saw good and decent people working to try 'to help lift these kids out of their terrible circumstances."

In the fall of 1973, Bush enrolled in Harvard Business School. "Harvard was a great turning point for him," his mother, Barbara Bush, told the Washington Post.

"I think he learned ...what is that word?

Structure." After receiving his master's of business administration degree in 1975, George decided to go back to Midland to try his hand at the oil business. He started out as a "landman"-a small businessman who researches the mineral rights to pieces of property and then seeks to negotiate leases for the promising oil properties. Before long, he began trading mineral and royalty interests and investing in drilling projects.

At a dinner at the home of friends in Midland in 1977, George W. met Laura Welch. She had been born in Midland and had earned a bachelor's degree in education from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and a master's degree in library science from the University of Texas at Austin. She was working as the librarian at an elementary school in Austin when she met George. The two fell in love and were married three months after they met.

George had already decided to run for Congress, for the seat being vacated by a Democrat who was retiring from the House of Representatives after serving for 43 years. After the wedding, therefore, the couple postponed their honeymoon in order to start campaigning, traveling all over the large West Texas congressional district.

Bush won the Republican nomination but

lost the race. He was pleased, however, by the fact that, in a district that had never elected a Republican, he had received 47 percent ofthe votes. "Defeat humbles you," Bush says inA Charge to Keep. "You work, you dream, you hope the people see it your way, then suddenly it's over and they did not. It's hard not to take a political loss personally; after all, it's your own name spelled out there on the ballot. Yet if you believe in the wisdom of the voters, as I do, you get over the disappointment, accept the verdict, and move on."

Moving on, for George, meant going back to Midland. He formed a company called Arbusto (Spanish for "bush") Energy, later changed to Bush Exploration, but things did not go well. Oil prices began falling in the early I980s, making it difficult for the new company to operate. In 1984, Bush decided to merge his company with another small exploration firm and became president of the new company, called Spectrum 7. During this time, in 1981, twin daughters, Barbara and Jerma, were born to George W. and Laura Bush.

"There was never any question that I would help take care of them," Bush says in A Charge to Keep. "1 was a modern dad, plus we had our hands more than full. For a while we had a nurse, but I learned to change diapers, give baths, and feed them.

We took them for long walks in the stroller."

The steep decline in oil prices continued, leaving Spectrum in serious financial trouble. In 1986, a larger company, Harken Energy Corporation, bought the small company. George W. worked for a while as a consultant to Harken, but then began helping with his father's presidential campaign, as an adviser and speechwriter.

After his father was elected to the presidency in 1988, George W. moved to Dallas, Texas, with the intention of opening a business there. However, news that the Texas Rangers professional baseball team, which played in a suburb of Dallas, was for sale changed his plans. Here was a chance to act on his lifelong love for baseball. He assembled a group of wealthy investors who bought the team for about $75 million. Bush himself used the money he had received when

Spectrum was sold to buy a small share.

He and another investor named Edward "Rusty" Rose were asked to handle the day-to-day management of the team.

"Rusty didn't like to give speeches or talk with the media," Bush says, "so I became the face and voice for the management of the Texas Rangers. I worked hard to sell tickets. I traveled the Rangers' market, which encompasses a huge part of Texas, speaking to civic groups and chambers of commerce. I did thousands of media interviews, touting baseball as a family sport and a great entertainment value."

In the process, George W. also became a prominent figure in Texas in his own right, out from under the shadow of his famous father. In 1993, after his father had been defeated in his bid for reelection, George W. decided to try again to run for office-this time for governor of Texas. He challenged the incumbent, Democrat Ann Richards, running on promises to improve public education and to reform the juvenile justice system, welfare, and the state's tort laws-the system under which an injured person may sue for damages. In November 1994, Bush defeated Ann Richards by a margin of 53 percent to 46 percent and became governor of Texas. Most observers agree that his first year in office was a very successful one. He worked well with the Democrats who controlled both houses of the Texas legislature-and managed to get bills passed that dealt with the issues he had emphasized in his campaign. As soon as he was elected, Bush put his interest in the Texas Rangers baseball team into a trust and gave up his managerial responsibilities. The team was later sold to a Dallas businessman. While governor he backed anti-crime legislation and tax cuts. Bush ran again for governor in 1998 and was re-elected with 69 percent of the vote. Soon after that, he began thinking about the possibil ity of running for President of the United States.

"The pressure to make a decision about seeking the presidency began mounting," Bush has said. "I wrestled with the decision. I was worried about my family, worried about exposing them to an environment that I know better than most. I

l-

II ichard B. Cheney, a distinguished public servant and businessman, is the Vice President-elect of the United States. Cheney, a familiar face on the Washington political scene, has served under severalty.S. Presidents-George W. Bush will be the fourth-and as an elected official.

Bush selected Cheney as his vice presidential running mate in July 2000, citing Cheney's insight, judgment, and experience. "Dick Cheney has served our countlyas chief of staff to a President, served in the United States Congress, and [served] as secretary of defense. He's a man of integrity who is respected by Republicans and Democrats."

Cheney has said that he sees his role in the administration as that of a frank but discreet adviser to Bush. Tnaccepting the Republican vice presidential nornination, Cheney stated that he looks forward to serving with a President who will work to "get things done by reaching across the partisan aisle and working with political opponents in good faith and common purpose."

Richard Bruce .Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on January 30, 1941, the son of Richard Herbert Cheney and the former Marjorie Lauraine Dickey.

When he was 13 years old, he moved with his family to Casper in the western state of Wyoming, where his father directed the local soil conservation district for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Following his graduation from Natrona County High School, where he was captain of the football team and senior class president, Cheney headed to Yale University in Connecticut on a scholarship. After less than two years at

R

1970, Cheney joined him as his deputy.

In August 1974, Gerald Ford " assumed the presidency and asked -"Rumsfeld to be his chief of staff.

IRumsfeld inunediately sought out i:! Cheney. When RUillsfeld left the ~White House in November 1974, iÂŤ =~== ~Cheney moved up to become assistant to the President and White George W Bush and Dick Cheney wave House chief of staff. Cheney was 34 to the media after Blish names Cheney years old at the time, the youngest person as his vice presidential running mate on July 25, 2000. ever to aSSlillle the job. He held the position throughout the remainder of the Yale, Cheney decided to continue his Ford administration. education in his home state, where he In 1977, Cheney again returned to earned bachelor's and master's degrees Wyoming, where he launched his political in political science from the University career as a member of the Republican of Wyoming. He thenllloved to the state Party. In 1978, Wyoming voters elected of Wisconsin, to work on a doctoral Cheney to serve as the small state's sole degree at the University of Wisconsin. congressman in the D.S. House of As a graduate student, he won a conRepresentatives. He was re-elected for gressional feUowship and moved'to another five two-year telms.

Washington, D.C., in 1968.

Cheney quickly established himself in Cheney worked first in the office of a the House and was selected by his colyoung Republican congressman from leagues to serve as chairman of tbe Wisconsin, William Steiger, and then for Republican Policy Committee from 1981 Donald H. RUlllsfeld, who headed the to 1987 ..He was elected chairman ofthe Office of Equal Opportunity. When House Republican Conference in 1987 President Richard M. Nixon selected and House Minority Whip, the Rumsfeld as White House counselor in second-ranking post in his political

~ ~' ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Lynne and Dick Cheney with their daughters, Mary and Eli::-abeth.

party's hierarchy, in 1988.

Cheney left the Congress in 1989 when President George Bush, father of the President-elect, tapped him to become secretary of defense. Cheney held that cabinet position until Janoaty 1993. During his tenure, he directed tWo of the largest rnilitaty campaigns in recent history-Operation Just Cause in Panama and Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East. For his leadership in the Gulf War, Cheney was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom-the United States' highest civilian honor, which recognizes exceptional meritorious service-in July 1991.

In 1995, Cheney signed on as chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Halliburton Company, an oilfield services firm. based in Dallas, Texas, that employs 100,000 people in 20 countries. Although he thought briefly about running for president in 1996, Cheney opted instead to remain at Halliburton, wbicll he did until his selection as George W. Bush's running mate.

Cheney mauied his secondary school sweetheart, Lynne Ann Vincent, in 1964. Lynne Cheney has l1ad her own career in public service, having served as chaiT of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 to 1993.

More recently, she has been senior fellow ill education and culture at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Vice President-elect and Mrs. Cheney have two children, daughters E1izabeth and Mary, and three granddaughters.

-CourtesyU.S. Department of State

know what it feels like to have someone you love torn up on the national stage, and I worried about putting my girls and my wife through that difficult process." He did decide to run, won his party's nomination in August 2000, and became President by winning more electoral college votes than Democrat AI Gore, who had been Vice President under Bill Clinton for eight years. Being the son of a former President may be an asset for the President-elect. "I learned a great deal from my dad's presidency and campaigns, lessons large and small," George W. Bush has said. "I learned the value of personal diplomacy as I watched my dad build friendships and relationships with foreign leaders that helped improve America's stature in the world. I learned firsthand the impotiance of surrounding yourself with smart, capable, and loyal people, friends who are not afraid to tell you what they really think and will not abandon ship when the water gets choppy. I learned you must give your senior advisers direct access to the boss, or they become frustrated and disillusioned .... And from a great leader, my dad, I learned the most important lesson of all: you can enter the arena, serve with distinction, absorb the slings and arrows, and emerge with dignity and integrity and the love of your family intact."

George W. Bush's policies are summed up in his speeches and writings. He has said often that Americans cannot depend on the federal government to solve all of society's problems, but must be willing to help their fellow citizens themselves. "We can now say, without question, that the belief that government could solve people's problems instead of people solving people's problems was wrong and misguided. That does not mean we should not help people. It means we should look for more effective means of help. We must reduce the reach and scope of the federal government, returning it to its proper, limited role, and push freedom and responsibility back to local governments, to neighborhoods, and to individuals ....

"The problem with government bureaucracies is not only that they are too costly.

They are also too cold. Often when a life

is broken, it can be rebuilt only by another caring, concerned human beingsomeone whose actions say, 'I love you, I believe in you, and I'm in your corner.'

This is compassion with a human face and a human voice."

He has said he wants full economic opportunity to be given to everyone in the United States. "Ours is an age of unmeasured prosperity," he has said. "Yet, in this

Presidential candidate George W Bush gives a parting handshake to Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov following a private meeting between the two in Washington, D.C., on April 26, 2000.

plenty, there is need. At the edges of affluent communities, there are those living in prosperity's shadow."

He outlined his views on the role of the United States in the world in his autobiography, where he writes that the world "looks for leadership from a country whose values are freedom and justice and equality. Ours should not be the paternalistic leadership of an arrogant big brother, but the inviting and welcoming leadership of a great and noble nation. We have an individual responsibility to our families and our communities, and a collective responsibility as citizens of the greatest and freest nation in the world. America must not retreat within its borders. Our greatest export is freedom, and we have a moral obligation to champion it throughout the world."

President-elect Bush believes in what he calls "a distinctly American interna-

Bush gathering-Vice President George Bush and his 'wife, Barbara, are joined by their children and grandchildren on the rocky Atlantic shore near their vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine.

tionalism." He has urged that America fight the temptation of withdrawal and isolationism, or "to move from crisis to crisis like a cork in a current. Unless a President sets his own priorities, his priorities will be set by others-by adversaries, or the crisis of the moment, live on C American foreign policy must be more than the management of crisis. It must have a great and guiding goal: to turn this time of American influence into generations of democratic peace." He adds, "An American President should work with our strong democratic allies in Europe and Asia to extend the peace. He should promote a fully democratic Western Hemisphere, bound together by free trade.

He should defend America's interests in the Persian Gulf and advance peace in the Middle East, based upon a secure Israel.

He must check the contagious spread of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. He must lead toward a world that trades in freedom.

And he must pursue all these goals with focus, patience, and strength."

George W. Bush is a supporter of free

trade: "To foreign governments, the next President must also carry a simple and unequivocal message: We will no longer tolerate favoritism and unfair subsidies for your national industries. We want to compete, and compete on level ground .... 1 will use all the leverage at our disposal to open agriculture markets worldwide."

"Europe and Asia ...the world's strategic heartland ...our greatest priority. Home of long-time allies, and looming rivals ....ln this immense region, we are guided not by an ambition, but by a vision. A vision in which no great power, or coalition of great powers, dominates or endangers our friends. In which America encourages stabi lity from a position of strength. A vision in which people and capital and information can move freely, creating bonds of progress, ties of culture, and momentum toward democracy.

"The long-standing commitments we have made to our allies are the strong foundation of our current peace. America must keep its pledges to defend friends from aggression. But our military should not become permanent peacekeepers, dividing warring parties. America should work with our allies to develop political solutions and a timetable to bring our troops home from places like Bosnia and Kosovo .... The presence of American

forces overseas is one of the most profound symbols of our commitment to allies and friends. And our allies know that if America is committed everywhere, our commitments are everywhere suspect.

We must be selective in the use of our military, precisely because America has other great responsibilities that cannot be slighted or compromised."

"It is time to leave the Cold War behind, and defend against the new threats of the 21st century. America must build effective missile defenses, based on the best available options, at the earliest possible date.

Our missile defense must be designed to protect all 50 states-and our friends and allies and deployed forces overseas-from missile attacks by rogue nations, or accidental launches ....A missile defense system should not only defend our country, it should defend our allies, with whom I will consult as we develop our plans. And any change in the ABM [Antiballistic Missile] treaty must allow the technologies and experiments required to deploy adequate missile defenses."

"America should rethink the requirements for nuclear deterrence in a new security environment. The premises of Cold War nuclear targeting should no longer dictate the size of our arsenal. It should be possible to reduce the number of American nuclear weapons significantly further than what has already been agreed to under START II, without compromising our security in any way.

We should not keep weapons that our military planners do not need. These unneeded weapons are the expensive rei ics of dead conflicts. And they do nothing to make us more secure. In addition, the United States should remove' as many weapons as possible from high-alert, hair-trigger status-another unnecessary vestige of Cold War confrontation. Preparation for quick launch -within minutes after warning of an attack-was the rule during the era of superpower rivalry, But today, for two nations at peace, keeping so many weapons on high alert may create unacceptable risks of accidental or unathorized launch."

-Courtesy

u.s. State

Department

Forget those single-purpose e-book readers. The future of electronic publishing lies in files you can download, view and print out from the computer you already own

took t a contemporary master of macabre thrillers to awaken the media and public to the existence of e-books. This spring, with great fanfare, Simon & Schuster brought out a novella by Stephen King called Riding the Bullet-the first work by a bestselling author released exclusively for electronic publication, to be read only on computerized screens, not paper. King's stunt made headlines and magazine covers, and the tsunami of demand for downloads of this e-book crashed Websites and traditional publishing assumptions.

But the future of e-books may have less to do with Stephen King than with Eric Rowe and other less well-known authors.

Rowe is a British potter who lives in the South of France, drawn there by the region's clays and minerals, which have been mined for stoneware since Roman times. To help ceramists in other areas unearth their own raw materials, he wrote A Potter s Geology.

But he couldn't find a book publisher in England for his manuscript. This was just too specialized a topic for a publisher in any one country. Still, Rowe was celtain that there would be interest in his book from potters everywhere.

Half a world away, in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Tony Hansen read about A Potter s Geology from a posting by Rowe in a ceramists' online discussion group. Hansen owns Digitalfire, a company specializing in software for calculations in ceramic chemistry. Hansen offered to publish Rowe's book electronically, sell ing the text on the Web as digital fi les in the Portable Document Format (PDF). PDF files are displayable on any Windows, DOS, Mac or Unix computer screen (and easily

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printed out) using the Acrobat reader software, downloadable free from Adobe Systems.

"I said I'd rather have my manuscript printed first," Rowe recalls. But Hansen won him over by pointing out that e-publication would produce immediate worldwide distribution. Now the book can be downloaded from the Web and viewed on any personal computer. Readers of the e-book can search the entire book and zoom in on high-resolution photos-even contact the author via an online hyperlink. The economics look good too: E-books require no printing, binding, inventory or shipping costs, allowing these savings to be passe~ on to the author in the form of higher royalties. A Potter:S Geology has sold only a few dozen copies, but Rowe is optimistic: "It won't be something that sells fast, but over a long time. It's not a subject that will go out of date. Even so, in digital format i(s easy to update or improve."

Thanks to Digitalfire and other budding Thanks to budding digital publishing enterprises, authors like Rowe are being empowered to digital publishing write about esoteric, highly personal houses, authors are topics and still find a worldwide audience-transcending the antiquated being empowered economics of shipping ink on wood to write about pulp and bypassing the gatekeepers esoteric, highly to traditional publishing. Just a little searching on the Web finds a growpersonal topics and ing e-book industry: more than 150 still find a worlde-book-only publishers, e-only bookstores, e-book trade publications online, wide audience. even e-book best-seller lists. The new e-publishers are testing a variety of business models for digital book distribution, while opening the way for a broader range of authors and works to be published on old-fashioned bound paper.

The great wonder is that this hasn't happened any sooner.

The first digital books date back to 1971 when Michael Hart was given a virtually unlimited account of computer time on the mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University ofIlJinois and decided that widely disseminating the contents of libraries was the greatest value computers could create. He typed in the text of the Declaration of Independence and so began Project Gutenberg, which now includes more than 2,000 classic works online, all free. To date, these are all plain text files-lacking the typeset-quality formatting that makes books eminently readable, somewhat compromising the reading experience. "When we started," Hart recalls, "there was only uppercase-how about that for a compromise?" Because Project Gutenberg's books were no longer under copyright, the original e-books required no copy protection schemes. Hart explains: "We encourage everyone to r~post our books in whatever formats they want. The most books to the most people-that's our only real goal."

In 1990, Voyager Co. introduced the first e-books meant to be read on personal computers. But these diskette-borne works, including Jurassic Park and Alice in Wonderland, were never offered by other publishers. Meanwhile, attempts to publish books on CD-ROM proved a dead end for all but encyclopedia and database publishers. The advent of the Web brought both opportunity and distraction for e-books. As the first universal publishing medium, the Web could make e-books easily accessible, with its Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) even retaining some print-style formatting. But HTML's orientation toward short documents was hardly optimized for book-length texts.

In the last year or so, the term "e-book" has been appropriated by companies selling portable gadgets whose sole purpose is to display electronic texts (see "Files or Gadgets?"). At the moment the number of these dedicated e-book readers-about 20,000-is dwarfed by the six million Palm Pilots and other Palm OS devices in use, making this versatile hardware the handheld reader of choice.

"Single-purpose devices like handheld readers are never going to have as big an installed base as general-purpose ones," insists Mark Reichelt, CEO of Peanut Press, the Maynard, Massachusetts, company that pioneered commercial e-book publishing on the Palm Pilot.

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he most. general-purpose hardware boxes of all are personal cpmputers. Yet despite hundreds of millions of PCs in use around the world, only a few hundred thousand of their users have downloaded e-books.

The slow st11rtis partly due to the perception that an e-book doesn't fully replicate the book-reading experience. MOre importantly, the download culture-first evident with browser plug-ins, then with software upgrades and MP3 music files-has only taken hold recently with the nongeek public.

Ads by Microsoft would have us believe that what the ebook world has been waiting for is the company's Reader program, which will be given away with every new copy of Windows. Microsoft Reader features ClearType software that evens out type edges on the screen. The reality is, how-' ever, that ClearType is warmed-over technology that failed to save handheld Windows CE devices from oblivion. To people accustomed to reading text on a computer for hours at a time, e-book screen clarity is a nonissue. Microsoft Reader also provides copy protection for authors and booksellers. But while e-books rights management may be important to intellectual property holders, it could be a futile quest. Any PC-based copy protection scheme can be cracked, as happened within two days of Stephen King's first e-publication.

With more than 100 million Acrobat readers already downloaded onto computers, PDF is the de facto standard

for e-book publication. PDF was specifically designed for preserving professional-quality documents across computer platforms and printers. And POF technology offers a ready solution for those reluctant to read off a screen; simply print out the files.

To counter Microsoft Reader, Adobe has recently beefed up its offerings with e-commerce encryption software called POF Merchant, allowing rights to an electronic copy of a book to be assigned to a single computer. In addition, Adobe has challenged Microsoft's ClearType with screen-enhancement routines of its own, which it calls CoolType; the competing technologies are similar enough in performance to make screen clarity even less of a concern. This year PDF will face a worthy challenger in the e-book format battle, as a consortium of e-book hardware ma:kers, traditional publishers, and Microsoft push the new Open eBook (OEB) standard.

The difference between OEB and POF is like the child's rhyme that begins: "I'm rubber, you're glue." PDF is glue, locking in a book's formatting so it can be preserved intact across out-

put devices; once created, it is not meant to be modified in any way. This can be a drawback if an author or publisher wants to access parts of the text for excerpting or reconfiguring for a customized e-book, or for sampling or sale in smaller increments than book length. OEB is rubber: It allows an e-book's content to be reformatted on the fly, using a markup language that is essentially an extension of HTML. OEB also makes it easy for dedicated reading devices to reformat text to fit their proprietary display configurations.

The first published spec for OEB addresses neither security nor e-commerce protocols, leaving it to individual vendors to come up with their own approaches. This omission raises the possibility that the proposed standard could splinter into a variety of incompatible implementations. Ultimately, both OEB and PDF could survive, with the rival formats used for different output stages of the same e-book-OEB in the intermediate stages of massaging editorial content, and PDF for final versions. (For all the flexibility of digital books, scholarship will probably demand that different editions of a work t;emain available in permanent form.)

FILES OR

GADGETS? be real e-books are specially formatted digital files of a printed book's content that can be displayed on, or printed out from, any garden-variety computer. Nevertheless, much oftbe e-book publicity of recent years has been drawn to single-purpose devices whose function is to display reading matter.in a booklike fashion.

None of these devices has ever really caught on. It's not hard to see why, begiill1ing with the handheld electronic dictionary that was introduced by Franklin Electronic Publishers in 1986, displaying a mere one line of text at a time. Five years later, Sony's Data Discman displayed disc-stored books on a roughly 8-centimeter screen-an improvement, but still too small for comfortable book reading.

By 1999, the hardcover-sized- SoftBoolc Reader from SoÂŁtBook Press and the paperback-sized Rocket eBook from NuvoMedia attracted media attention to tbe current generation uf e-book display gadgetry. While well designed, these dedicated devices are pricey: $200-$600.

Another big drawback is the readers' proprietary file formats, requidng that additional versions of e-literature be made available for downloading.

In January 2000, both SoftBook Press and NuvoMedia were acquired by Gemstar International Group. Gemstar aims to relaunch versions of both readers, manufactured by Thomson Cunsumer Electronics, with expectations ofse]]ing about half a million units a year. [f these gadgets succeed, you'll read all about it.

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-boOkS are shaking up publishing business models that have remained unchanged since the days of Dickens, much as MP3 compression technology has rocked the music industry. For the moment, even the most forward-looking print publishers are pricing their initial e-book offerings almost identically with paper editions, as if there were no difference in their underlying atoms versus bits economics. At St. Martin's Press, the first major publisher to simultaneously issue a hardcover and e-book edition of the same title (Monica s StOlY in March 1999), senior vice president for finance administration Steve Cohen explains: "Our prices on new titles are at the hardcover level because there's a high start-up cost for e-book editions." Kate Tentler, publisher of Simon & Schuster Online, was responsible for Web distribution of Stephen King's Riding the Bullet (priced at $2.50, the 66 pages of the e-novella averaged out to the retail per-page cost of a King hardcover novel). Says Tentler, "We think of an e-book as just another book."

As a few traditional publishers defensively convert to digital files for downloads, the independent e-publishing industry has seen countless business models bloom. On the same March day that the Stephen King brand name sold 400,000 paperless copies of Riding the Bullet, Frank Weyer received a grand total of two requests for his serialized e-mystery, MlT Can Be Murder, on his own site (e-bookpress.com). Despite such paltry numbers, efforts

by Weyer and other e-book authors are already undermining the influence of blockbuster-minded agents and trend-driven book editors. Weyer, for example, had sent the manuscript for his first murder mystery to 10 literary agents, all of whom declined to submit it to book publishers. "They said the mystery field is difficult for a newcomer," Weyer recalls. "But how do you become a published mystery author if you can't get published?"

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Self-publishing on paper, a solution for some, seemed prohibitive for this patent and trademark attorney and smallscale Internet entrepreneur (he holds exclusive right to sell Web domain names registered in the nation of Moldovaending in .md-to doctors in California and New York).

Rather than letting his manuscript molder in a drawer, Weyer decided to publish it via e-mail. The first four chapters of the whodunnit, inspired by the year he spent at MIT studying for a PhO in ocean engineering, were offered first to 3,000 MIT alumni, and then to 15,000 names on other university alumni lists. He released the rest of the 21 O-page book in 12 monthly installments. Some 1,400 readers have downloaded the entire e-novel.

Weyer's novel-by-subscription might seem like an innovation made possible by the digital era. In fact, it is a throwback to the early days of 19th-century book publishing, when books were sold by subE-books are scription before publication, to raise revshaking up enue to pay the printing costs up front. publishing business With no printing to worry about, the frictionless economy lets Weyer dismodels that have tribute his work for free. Now that remained unchanged he has successfully bypassed print publishers to get his words read, he since the days of has begun subscription-publishing Dickens, much as the work of other writers. The first addition is The Butcher:S Cleaver, a MP3 compression spy thriller by W. Patrick Lang. Soon technology has Weyer plans to generate income by selling print-on-demand versions of both rocked the music his and Lang's books. Nonetheless, he industry. would like MfT Can Be Murder to be picked up by a mainstream publisher. "1 just wanted to build word of mouth," he says of his e-book. "I would like to see it in as many forms as possible."

Giving away complete works to help an author build a following is sti II anathema to most traditional publ ishers, who must absorb the cost to produce, store and ship the physical books. But giving away paperless e-books is a no-brainer, following the time-tested freeware and shareware models in computer software. Independently published e-books may not be as polished or as slick as store-bought commercial offerings, but they can hold their own in user appreciation. And Frank Weyer's writing is certainly on par with that in much of to day's massproduced paperback fiction.

Traditional publishers' understandable fear that e-books may cannibalize sales of print editions seems to be overblown, at least judging from the experience of one of their more adventurous colleagues. Last September, veteran science-fiction publisher Jim Baen initiated what he calls eWebScriptions; for $10 a month, visitors to Baen.com may download quat1er-of-a-book-sized installments of four titles about to appear in print. Even after receiving the full text in

HTML, "more of our subscribers buy the finished book than don't buy it," says Baen. By March, the added promotion had already helped propel one of the earliest eWebScriptions titles, Ashes of Victmy by David Weber, onto hardcover best-seller lists.

In addition to altemative mat'keting strategies, e-publishers can tap into income streams legally denied to traditional publishers. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service disallows low book-mailing rates for printed material that contains adve11ising. No such restriction inhibits the sales of ads for e-books.

Ba11Ieby.com, for example, offers free, ad-supported classics and reference works online. At BiblioBytes.com, books can be read on ad banner-sponsored Web pages, with some popular titles downloadable for a fee; authors get a cut of the ad revenue. Abroad, the alternatives are just as dramatic; in France, pioneer e-publisher Zero Hour is able to offer lessexpensive editions of current books because digital files cannot be taxed as print books are.

he power of e-books as a promotional medium has probably best been demonstrated

by Melisse Shapiro, who writes under the nom de plume M.J. Rose. Her first novel, Lip Service, an erotically charged thriller, was rejected by a dozen book publishers for being too steamy for the chain bookstores. She opted to publish from her own Website, offering digital downloads for $10 or photocopies of the manuscript for $20.

Even when the password for her e-book was stolen and posted online, resulting in 1,000 pirated downloads, she managed to-receive 150 paid orders for e-books and 500 orders for photocopies. She invested in printing 3,000 copies to help create buzz; at one point, it was the 123rd best-seIling title on Amazon.com. Following her online blitz, Doubleday Direct picked up Lip Service for its mail-order book clubs and soon after, Pocket Books signed up print rights in hardcover and paperback. Building on her success, Shapiro has become a leading advocate of e-books, with her frequent reports to Wired News online providing the most comprehensive ongoing coverage of e-publishing.

"Everything in my life would be different if not for e- . books," she says.

On the same day in March that Stephen King generated 400,000 orders, Leta Childers' comic romance e-novel, The Best Laid Plans, was downloaded 200 times from her publisher's Website, DiskUspublishing.com. Childers is King's peer in one respect: Hers is the bestselling work released to date among digital-format-only publishers, according to the best-seller list compiled by eBook Connections. With some 20,000 copies of her e-book issued (at $3.50 for a downloaded copy, $6.50 on diskette), the rural South Dakotabased Childers has helped establish DiskUs Publishing of Albany, Indiana, as one of the most successful digital-only

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author Arthur C. Clarke was the inspiration for King to test the publishers. In the still largely New York-based traditional pubdigital publishing waters. Also fitting the eMatter designation: lishing world, Childers says, "submission envelopes with Eric Rowe's 91-page A Potter :sGeology.

Midwest return addresses are easy to ignore." Then in a familiar King and Rowe have something else in common: an abiding refrain for e-book authors, she adds: "I would love to be tradibelief in the importance of traditional books. King has been tionally published." widely quoted as stating: "1 don't think anything will replace DiskUs is a publisher in the traditional sense of having editors who help prepare manuscripts for publication. Other e- the printed word and the bound book. Not in my lifetime, at least." For Rowe, too, it's not a question of digital books suppublishers disseminate authors' works for a fee, without planting analog ones. "For some kinds of book," he says, "the exercising editorial control. Such "vanity presses" have long aesthetic pleasure of having the object in the hand will be diffibeen the Rodney Dangerfields of publishing, but vanity e-pubcult to replace." lishers are proving attractive to mainstream book firms explorIt should come as no surprise that proponents of e-books are ing new publishing paradigms. Following a recent investment not out to eliminate paper publishing. After all, most e-books atby Random House, Xlibris.com now provides a no-fee, notempt to replicate traditional books' content and appearance. For frills e-publishing package. Barnes & Noble is backing the most part, e-books can be printed out with only minimal loss iUniverse.com, which offers new authors a basic $99 e-pubof information (primarily broken hypertext links). And for all lishing service; it reserves free publication for authors submittheir seeming differences, print and electronic publishers are ting out-of-print works, a program originally developed with putting out similar content. Eventually, digital downloads seem the Authors Guild. destined to become just one more format for readers, one more For authors who've already been in print, one of the greatest benefits that e-books can offer is the resurrection of their old step on the convenience/cost continuum from hardcover to pahard-to-find titles. As publishing companies have consolidated, perback to e-book. worthy works have been relegated to the limbo of out-of-print.

At some point in the future, however, e-books and print are bound to diverge. Lurking amidst e-publishing today is the noE-publishing provides an inexpensive way to restore the availability of these lapsed works. Among the most innovative of e- tion of multimedia books that seamlessly incorporate hypertext, publishers, Alexandria Digital Literature has revived hundreds of sound and animation. A hypertext branching narrative in a novel out-of-print stories and poems, typically priced from 30 cents to or a history book, for instance, would be impossible to reproduce $1.25. Buyers are asked to send in their ratings; when enough ratin a book.

A glimmer of tomorrow's multimedia books, or m-books, may ings accumulate, they can be compared to others' ratings and be discerned in a dark-horse contender among e-publishing file other reading recommendations are offered. formats called TK3. Introduced by Night Kitchen-a New York Also being revived are questions about traditional publishers' startup headed by Voyager Co. co-founder Bob Stein- TK3 is exclusivity over their authors' works. When Simon & Schuster ,the basis for a sophisticated literary software environment. The made Stephen King's Riding the Bullet available tlu'ough online booksellers and e-book hardware and software firms, one site Night Kitchen TK3 Reader offers the most booklike reading experience on a desktop or laptop computer screen-complete with was pointedly excluded: Fatbrain.com. Since last fall, Fatbrain highlighting, corner-folding bookmarks, even Post-it-like has been posting works it brands as "eMatter": original fiction "stickie notes." And TK3's easy-to-use multimedia authoring and nonfiction ranging from 10 to I 00 pages (lengths that many people will be willing to print out). Subsequently designating the tools are meant, according to Stein, "to empower a new generasite for such pieces MightyWords.com, Fatbrain has targeted a tion of authors who want to express themselves in the new media." Using this hyperlink-sound-and-motion superset of segment of publishing that falls between magazines and books, where the modern economics of print have all but shut out a traditional books to express themselves, such a new generation of once-thriving sector of short stories and novellas. Simon & authors would hasten Stein's prediction that "the locus of intellectual discourse will shift from the print medium to the elecSchuster saw Fatbrain as a rival. tronic medium."

Fatbrain's brief history shows how quickly e-book business For now, the advent of e-books means not replacing print, but supplans and branding can change. A mere six months after launchplementing it-redefining publishing economics and opening the ing the eMatter trademark and drawing attention to the similarly way for authors whose work has been kept from appearing between named Website, Fatbrain decided to let its trademark lapse. book covers. If e-books do nothing more, regardless of the success "MightyWords was a name that could ring through to our profesor lack thereof of new gadgetry to display them, this technology will sional audience, while eMatter is a generic term for the range have a profound effect on what we read and what we think. of electronic documents we are publishing," explains Judy Join a discussion about e-book technology at www.techreKirkpatrick, executive vice president and general manager of 0 MightyWords. Already the eMatter I0-to-100-page category en- view. com/forums. compasses many of e-book publishing's early milestones, including King's Riding the Bullet. Simon & Schuster may not like it, About the Author: Steve Dillea is a contributing writer of Technology Review. but Fatbrain's publication of an eMatter essay by science fiction

eBirding at the end of ~ature More people watch birds than hunt and fish combined. But that doesn't necessarily bode well for the environment.

arly this spring, long before the trees had leafed, I found myself standing in the rain in a dark field in southern New Jersey waiting for woodcocks-shy, chunky, long-billed birds-to rise out of the shadows and begin their mating dance. Sometimes called timberdoodles, woodcocks are not the most graceful birds on the planet. Their eyes are spaced so far apart that you might wonder how they can see the trees in front of them. As the late winter days begin to lengthen, they throw caution to the wind, and at dawn and dusk the males rise straight up into the air some 60 or 100 meters and then spiral down, uttering a plaintive, musical series of notes.

Although deterred by cold, they don't seem to be bothered by rain-and that's a good thing, too, because this "sky dancing" is how they maintain themselves as a species. The mystery is what was I, a devoted urbanite, doing there?

I've been watching birds for six years.

It all began at a brunch in Manhattan when someone happened to mention that soon the warblers would be arriving in Central Park. I didn't know what precisely warblers were, but I knew in some uncanny way that when they arrived I would go out to find them. The next day, I signed up for a course in beginning birdwatching at the New York City chapter of the Audubon Society. There were two classes and two field trips-one to the Jamaica Bay wildlife refuge and one to Central Park. To get to Jamaica Bay, I took the A train to Broad Channel in

Queens, where I saw glossy ibis and snow assignments to birding hot spots like geese and egrets rising against the Madera Canyon in southern Arizona, Manhattan skyline, sharing the air with Bosque del Apache in New Mexico, the jets taking off from Kennedy Airport. On Orkneys in Scotland, the Everglades. the trip to Central Park, not two blocks I had stumbled into a vast, largely from where I live, I saw warblers-tiny, invisible world. It seemed like a private colorful neotropical migrants, flitting with discovery, until it dawned on me that I mysterious life in the trees and bushes of was part of a quiet revolution. The first the Ramble, the IS-hectare woodland at time T traveled for the express purpose of the heart of the park. birding I went to Point Pelee in Ontario.

Some 300 of North America's 700 bird Pulling into the bed-and-breakfast where species pass through New York City each my wife and I were staying, I saw a car spring on their way north. Discovering with vanity plates that read "Birder." At 6 these birds in the park where I had played . a:m. in the packed parking lot of the as a child was a revelation. T had not nature preserve the next morning, I found hundreds of people wearing sun hats and known at the time that nature was missing from my life, but this newfound connecbinoculars; though somewhat taken aback tion to something wild made me feel, for by the crowds, I felt a thrilling shock of lack of a better word, whole. It was as if T recognition. Like the birds themselves, the world of bird-watching had simply had never seen the stars and someone been hidden from me. Once I was initiattapped me on the shoulder one night and ed, I found a whole complex culture waittold me to look up. ing to receive me.

With a convert's zeal, I began spending According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife countless hours stalking birds with my binoculars, and as soon as spring was Service, somewhere between 42 million and 50 million Americans over the age of. over, I began to look forward to fall, when they would come back on their return 16 watch birds, far more than the numbers flight. I began subscribing to mainstream of people who hunt and fish combined.

Birders spend some $20 billion a yearperiodicals like Audubon and Natural History and then to specialty journals with on travel and optics and gear and seednames like Birder s World, Birdwatcher s and scores of birding festivals have sprung tlp in the last few decades, reversDigest and Winging It. 1 bought Birding

by Ear tapes and Peterson s Guide to ing the fortunes of small coastal towns in Eastern Birds, then the comprehensive Hooded Warbler. Warblers inspired National Geographic Guide and speciesthe author s bird-watching hobby when he specific volumes like Warblers of the discovered them in the Ramble, the 15Americas and Hawks in Flight. I began to hectare woodland in New Yorks Central plan my vacations and even my work Park, a few blocks Fom his apartment.

Texas and rural backwaters in regions that were once neglected. There are now more than 400 franchise stores, like Wildbird Unlimited, specializing in birding gear and birdseed, and some 600 more independents. Twenty years ago there were almost none. Last August, Houghton Mifflin-which, since publishing Roger Tory Peterson's first field guide in 1934, has sold eight million Peterson bird guides-published a new field guide to the birds by Kenn Kaufman with a first printing of 150,000 copies, making it Houghton Mifflin's biggest book of the year. Tn October, Knopf brought out The Sibley Guide to Birds, created by the master bird atiist David Allen SibleYl with a print run of 100,000.

The appeal of birds may be mythically ingrained-think of the bird gods of Egypt-but there are also practical explanations. For one thing, they're still here.

Remnants of wild America may lurk in corners ofthe countlY, but birds, thanks to their ability to fly, span the continent.

"There is probably no place in orth America where you can stand and not hear birds," Pete Dunne, director of the Cape May Bird Observatory, told me.

Even from my apartment, I hear blue jays and mourning doves and house finches and the occasional downy woodpecker. Tn the heart of downtown, pigeons pace the windowsills in memory of their cliffdwelling rock dove origins, and sparrows peep out of the hollow metal crossbars of virtually every traffic light. For Dunne, the environmental movement of the 1960s "left its imprint on everyone," so that grown-up baby boomers with time on their hands are not simply discovering nature but returning to something that touched them when they were teenagers learning about the effects ofDDT. Dunne, 48, himself typifies the new sort of birder; he has helped popularize the pursuit with lively books like Tales of a LowRent Birder as well as serious field guides.

He is also the creator ofthe World Series of Birding, a fi路eewheeling annual event that takes place the second week of May in which pat1icipants have 24 hours to find as many bird species as possible using the entire state of New Jersey as the playing

field. The team with the most sightings at the end of the day wins. Begun in 1984 with 13 teams, the World Series now attracts more than 50 teams from all over the world and raises about half a million dollars for conservation groups. The World Series and numerous similar events, like the Great Texas Birdathon, gratify the naked competitive energy that fuels a certain sort of bird-watching-sometimes referred to as "birding," distinct from birdwatching. Birders are more likely to keep "life lists" of what they have seen and are known to travel great distances to add a single bird-a Lesser Prairie Chicken in, say, Kansas or a Rose-throated Becard in Arizona-to their lists.

I am neither a fanatical "lister" nor a casual backyard bird-watcher but something in between. Of course, birding itself

is an in-between activity, half science and half pastime, half sport and half conservationist crusade. Born of an ancient impulse, it required the 20th century, when binoculars replaced the shotgun, to be fully realized. Some primal, conquering hunter's urge is never far below the surface when I'm out with my binoculars, even though the living bird is all I'm after.

Linked to the natural world, bird-watching nevetiheless forces me to stand at a slight remove. It is more about the interplay of the human and the natural-naming, labeling, fitting the wild world against the ordering grid of human understanding, even as I am simultaneously lured farther out into animal habitats. I am left with something both untamed and ordered-a weirdly satisfying, deeply human mixture of elements.

But things may not be as satisfying for the birds. "The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk"-Hegel's comment about civilizations flourishing as they move toward the brink of extinction-has an eerie echo for bird-watchers. Just as nature was, in some sense, beginning for me, Bill McKibben was foretelling The End of Nature. The inexhaustible, self-renewing environment of our fantasies died with the Industrial Revolution, and unless we change our ways, he posited, rising temperatures, acid rain and a host of other ills will carry off what's left of the natural world. Bird-watching, alas, is not necessarily an indication of the health of the bird population. George Fenwick, presi-

dent of the American Bird Conservancy, a small but important advocacy group, points to the fanaticism of British birdwatchers, well known in this country because so many show up at American birding spots. "The best birders are there and everyone's obsessed with birds," he told me, and yet "there's hardly a wood lot left--everything's been developed and redeveloped. I'm glad the Brits are so interested, but I hope that's not our fate."

Bird-watching, in other words, may be what you do at the end of nature.

According to Frank Gill, director of science for the National Audubon Society, one out of every six species in North America is in trouble, declining 2 to 10

percent a year; over 20 or 30 years, that means whole species would be cut in half-or worse.

On the wall of my study, near a multiplying collection of bird books, hangs a reproduction of Audubon's portrait of two passenger pigeons. Although these birds roosted communally and flew in flocks so vast that they darkened the sky for homs while passing overhead, Audubon has given them individual life, a male and female, touching bills. T find these birds, peach and blue and gray, not merely beautiful but haunting, a SOli of avian memento mori. One hundred years ago, on March 24, 1900 (and it adds a weirdly modem element that we know the exact date), the last wild passenger pigeon ever recorded was shot out of the sky in Pike County, Ohio.

Fourteen years later, the last surviving member of the species, a bird named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Today's imperiled birds include the Bicknell's thrush, a modest species that nests on mountaintops fi'om New York to Canada and winters on the island of Hispaniola in the highest elevations of the Dominican Republic-where 90 percent of the land has already been deforested.

Development and population pressures there are such that there is a real danger of extinction, not merely for the Bicknell's thrush but for other species wintering there as well. The grand migratory flights of birds that 1 found so exhilarating because they carried my imagination in all directions, even standing in Manhattan looking up, began, as T became more aware of their imperiled status, to darken the sky with danger-and with politics.

Paul Kerlinger, an expert in bird migration who studies the economic impact of birdiJlg, wants bird-watchers to wake up to their enormous spending power. They might agree to a tax on birdseed, he says, or endorse legislation like the Conservation and Reinvestment Act, which would use revenues from offshore oil drilling to suppoti habitat conservation. His studies have shown that ecotourism often brings more money to an area like the Delaware Bay than a local industry like horseshoe crab harvesting, which has a directly adverse effect on the birds. But his economic

approach has had only limited appeal. "I don't know if they're all Luddites or Socialists or what," Kerlinger says in frustration, alluding to the deep-seated fear among some bird-watchers that market forces are at odds with environmentalism.

However birders feel about economic strategies, it is not easy to organize people who do something so solitary and so individualistic.

Unlike hunting or fishing, birding requires no license-you need only slip out the door with a pair of binoculars, which is why Kenn Kaufman, who dropped out of high school and hitchhiked across the country looking for birds, calls bird-watching a "subversive" activity.

Make a birder, make a conservationist, Roger Tony Peterson said. All I really wanted was to look at birds-but that won't be possible if! don't give in to this secondary duty and make my thinkjng as global as the birds themselves are. It remains to be seen ifthe rise in bird-watchers can somehow stop the disappearance of the birds-since saving the birds means saving the places they live, which is to say what's left of the natural world.

The great biologist Edward O. Wilson coined the term "biophilia" to describe the inborn need of human beings to affiliate with nature because as a species we evolved within the natural world. We may have an urge to conquer nature, but we

altogether unlike the "meep meep" sound still need it around us for our mental and even our genetic health. If this is true,- , the roadrunner makes in the cartoon when then conservation is really only a form of he sees the coyote. Everyone in my group self-interest. And bird-watching, as I have falls breathlessly silent, and then there is a long suspected, isn't really a hobby, any whir of wings that make their own music as the bird launches himself from a nearmore than rearing my daughter is a hobby.

It's just a way of participating in the natby patch of scrub straight up into the air. ural world that produced me, if only in a When he reaches the apex of his flight he token, postmodern manner. begins to drift down in a wavering series In his poem "The Oven Bird," Robert of spirals, singing as he goes. If his song Frost made this small warbler with a is successful, then when he lands, in the stripe of orange down the middle of its exact spot he took off from,' a female woodcock will be waiting for him and head (easily seen in Central Park in May) they will mate. a metaphor for the vanishing natural The woodcock is dimly visible against world. "The question that he frames in all but words-," the poet wrote, "is what to the dark sky, and for a moment philosomake of a diminished thing." That is still phy and ecology and poetry and politics all go out the window. What to make of a the question bird-watching poses. I think diminished thing? It will take a lifetime to of this in my field in southern ew Jersey, where the light is failing, my patience is figure that out. But for one brief, heartwaning and the woodcock, as a chill wind stopping second, the bird itself seems like answer enough.

0 kicks up, is making itself scarce.

Nature itself may be failing-and we About the Author: Jonathan Rosen is the may be failing it. But from out of the founding culture editor of The Forward and darkness, I suddenly hear the call of the the author of Eve's Apple and The Talmud woodcock-a buzzy, nasal "peent" not and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds.

Rishi Bhat o you want to become a millionaire in your teens? Do it like this: begin to learn multiplication at the age of 2, write computer programs at 6, act in a Hollywood movie at 10, and become a crusader for all those "eroded selves" (see SPAN, November/December 2000) who want to maintain anonymity while surfing the Net by writing security programs.

Rishi Bhat did all these things. As a I5-year-old boy from Chicago, he knew a great deal about violation of privacy on the Net and was concerned about it. He wrote a software program called SiegeS urfer, which protects the privacy of millions of Internet surfers around the world. It prevents outsiders from tracking sites visited and safeguards personal information while on the Net. It also blocks hostile Internet programs embedded in the Web page that may damage the computer or gather sensitive personal data. It stops any unwanted cookies. After writing the program and sOlting out other technical details, Bhat joined hands with his classmate Antonio Gullien to design a Website.

The two started a company called SiegeSoft.

Rishi Bhat has been working on computers since his childhood. He has said, "1 found computers very interesting. 1 could make them do whatever I wanted." At age 7 he was creating computer games. His favorite bedtime book was the DOS manual. At the University of Chicago Laboratory School, where he had been a student since kinderg3lten, one of his teachers explained the concept of probability to the class with the help of a computer program that flipped a coin. Bhat was more interested in how the program had been made than the theory that was being taught. The teacher was amazed when his parents told her about Bhat's interest in understanding the program.

Besides his career in information technology Rishi Bhat has

D

also acted in a Paramount Pictures movie, The Indian in the Cupboard, when he was 10. He is a classical pianist, can play the clarinet, and also plays junior varsity tennis.

But according to his father, Shrikant Bhat, he is a normal teenager. "He hangs out with his friends, listens to rock music and has his 'moments' like all teenagers," said the elder Bhat.

So how did he make his millions? Amonth after establishing his site, David Hodge, a Vancouver stock promoter, was so astonished by the boy's invention that he was willing to negotiate with Bhat.

He also admired Bhat's business acumen during the course of negotiations. Hodge felt that Bhat had the leading edge in privacy software and he found people who were ready to invest $2.1 million on the project. Hodge changed his company's name from Rocco Resources to Siegesoft.com after his offer of $40,000 in cash and 1.5 million performance shares to Bhat was accepted. ow the shares are wOlth more than $3 million according to market sources. Bhat is also on the advisory board of SiegeSoft.

SiegeSoft.com offers a variety of products like SiegeSurfer, SiegePipe, SiegeWindowWasher and SiegeMail that protects the surfer from exposure and invasion.

Rishi Bhat is already working on his new venture called MyeDESK, which will host virtual meetings and electronic forums, with his patineI' and schoolmate Chaitanya Mehra. Even after achieving so much in the field of computers he wants to be a doctor. He has said, "I really don't like computers as much as people think 1 do. Being a doctor will be much more satisfying.

I use computers because they make my life go faster and easier."

His mother says she won't be surprised if he combines medicine and computer knowledge to develop new technologies.

-K. Muthukumar

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here are several categories of temporary worker visas, besides the commonly known H-I B category. All applicants who try for the temporary worker visa must have a petition approved by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) before applying for the visa.

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Bindu la Terre

7983. oil on canvas. diptych, 159.4 x 80 em.

he contemporary Indian art will now find a permanent home in the United States at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. After the museum's $115million expansion plan is complete in year 2003, the Chester and Davida Herwitz collection of contemporalY 311 of India, which the museum received recently as a gift, will be permanently displayed at its 260-square-meter gaJlelY路 At a brief but impressive ceremony held at the Roosevelt HOllse-the official residence of the U.S. Ambassador in New Delbi-in November last year, Johnl;arker, president of the board of trustees of the Peabody Essex Museum, announced a bequest of$l million that will be used to support exhibitions, publications, scholarship and public programs related to the collection of contemporary Indian art. He added: "Americans have been exposed mainly to Indian class ica I art, so th is will be the first time that they will get to see the contemporary Indian art as it has developed since independence."

The gift from the Chester and Davida Herwitz collection encompasses 850 works of art by 67 leading contemporary Indian artists, including M.P. Husain, Jamini Roy, Manjit Bawa, Biren De, S.H. Raza and Tybe Mehta. It also includes a major intemational 311libr3l"Y,an archive of personal letters, papers and other documents related to the colJection.

The 200-year-old Peabody Essex Museum is a pioneer in the study and presentation oflndian art in the United States. The museum began collecting art and culture from contemporary India shortly after its foundation as the East India Marine Society in 1799, and has built its Indian collection since then. Today, the museum's holdings include thousands of works from India, starting from 18tb century through 20th century, including paintings and drawings works in clay, wood and metal, embroideries, furniture and photographs.

The Peabody Essex Museum's role as an impOltant advocate for modern Indian 311provides great opportunities to both artists and art lovers and colJectors in the United States in the new millennium.

-A,V,N. Photos courtesy Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, from the Chester and Davida Herwitz c:olJection,

M.F. Husain

Gandhiji

1972, oil on canvas, 255.3 X 113 em.

Manjit Bawll

Db3l"ma and the God

1984, oil o~~canvas, 216x /85.4 em.