The puzzling thing for anyone outside America is the conservatism and docility of the American working people. In France, their confrères are off on their five-week paid vacations; in Canada, they have brought a straight-out Socialist party back into a position of influence, because they cling stubbornly to their right to free national health care. In America, though, we are all remarkably inclined to take it on the chin and keep pedalling. The old explanation of this was, essentially, the bicycle-messenger compact: n exchange for hard work and long hours, you got to pedal your own bicycle to a better life. But over the past twenty-five years that compact has been dissolving. Maybe we are having more feudal moments because American life is becoming more feudal. An open, mercantile society is a society run on the bargain of future prospects: in exchange for your subservient labor, we will provide hope. A feudal society is, simply, a society run on the bargain of fear: in exchange for your labor and subservience, we will provide security.

"I'm not against teaching faith-based ideas in religion classes; I'm just against teaching them as if they were science. And it disturbs me when someone like Bill Gates, whose philanthropy I otherwise admire, helps finance one of the major promoters of intelligent design by giving money to a largely conservative think tank called the Discovery Institute. Yes, they got a recent grant from the Gates Foundation. It's true that the almost $10-million grant, which is the second they received from Gates, doesn't support intelligent design, but it does add credibility to a group whose goals and activities are, based on my experiences with them, intellectually suspect. During the science standards debate in Ohio, institute operatives constantly tried to suggest that there was controversy about evolution where there wasn't and framed the debate in terms of a fairness issue, which it isn't." [Editors' note: Amy Low, a media relations officer representing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, says that the foundation "has decided not to respond to Dr. Krauss's comments."]

In June, the State Supreme Court, citing the "overwhelming evidence" against Mr. Crawford, found he had not shown that the results of DNA testing of any of the objects could reasonably have resulted in his acquittal.

But Mr. Crawford's lawyers and Mr. Scheck say the evidence presented against Mr. Crawford is exactly the kind that DNA testing has repeatedly refuted.

Apparent conflicts of interest do affect public perception, according to a recent CSPI survey of 1000 adults. While 59% of respondents had confidence in a hypothetical statement from "a Harvard professor supported by government research" stating that a drug is safe, 48% had confidence when the statement was attributed just to a "Harvard professor," 41% when it was attributed to "a Harvard professor whose research is supported by drug companies," and 24% when the statement was attributed to "a Harvard professor who owns stock in drug companies."

People in law offices and other paper-heavy enterprises worship the PDF format because it lets them call up a specific page in a specific contract on their hard drive in seconds without having to comb through file cabinets and get paper cuts. Now the same perk is available to anyone.

Then, after 22 years on the academic fast track, he quit - at age 37. He left Oberlin and his first wife, with whom he had had two children, and traveled around the world for three months. Then he settled in Berkeley where, he said, "I sat still for two years, read 200 books and completely re-educated myself."

Seen one way, the cornerstone's darkness and plainness are memorial, even funereal. Seen another, the radiant silver-leaf letterforms conjure the exuberant, modernist,
midcentury optimism of New York even as they augur the glass and stainless-steel tower to come.

The literary reading public lost 5 percent of its girth between 1982 and 1992; another 14 percent dropped away in the following decade. And though the number of readers of literature is about the same now as it was in 1982 - about 96 million people - the American population as a whole has increased by almost 40 million.