Soon after Sept. 11, editors began phoning novelists to commission essays, in the hope that literary writers could offer a better, deeper response to the attacks than mere journalists could. Don DeLillo's name turned up at the top of everyone's wish list. That's how we think of him, as the novelist with a direct line on the weird, powerful yet slippery spectacles and paradoxes of contemporary life. Surely he could nail down for us the meaning of the images of those sleek, bland towers with their fiery wounds against the lurid perfection of the morning sky, and parse the queasy intersection of raw communal horror and great TV. But when Mr. DeLillo finally did publish his 9/11 piece, months later, in Harper's Magazine , it was just like everyone else's: a rote description of what happened and a half-hearted gesture in the direction of the unfathomable.

We badly want there to be a novelist who can pronounce on the Big Themes of our mediated world, and Mr. DeLillo has always been up for the job. For all his weaknesses (plot, character, dialogue), he writes terrific set pieces-critics and fellow novelists will forgive you anything if you deck it out in a glittering style-and he can work himself up into quite a state about the significance of it all. He's not afraid to be grandiose; that, and his eloquence combines potently with our desire for an oracular voice to obscure the fact that for years almost everything Big he has had to say has been either 1) banal or 2) wrong.

Mr. DeLillo is a great writer going grievously off the rails as a result of not attending to his strengths. His last novel, The Body Artist , began with 20 pages of perfection, a description of a married couple having breakfast. It was followed by many more unexceptional pages of solemn, gnomic maunderings about grief and loss. Reading those first 20 pages, it's possible to believe in miracles, or at least in the power of genius to transform something utterly ordinary into an intimation of the divine, to fill us with wonder at the texture of our lives. With the rest of the book, it's what happened?

His newest novel, Cosmopolis , alas, is all what happened? Is the book supposed to be serious? Funny? A parody of Mr. DeLillo's own writing, with its pompous pronouncements ("Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did …. Money is talking to itself"), the apocalyptic posturing, surreal crowd scenes and brainy, numbed-out yet studly protagonist? It's distressingly hard to tell. Nevertheless, this is a deeply silly book, and it's hard to imagine that that could be intentional.

Cosmopolis relates a day in the life of Eric Packer, a monumentally rich assets manager who, at 28, has "made and lost sums that could colonize a planet." He spends most of the day riding around the streets of Manhattan in a fantastically outfitted white stretch limo in search of a haircut and, along the way, encountering both the expected (a host of hirelings, including his currency analyst and his chiefs of security, technology, finance and theory), and not (his wife of 22 days, a riot in Times Square, a homeless assassin). The novel seems intended to be a dissection of digital man, his overreaching hubris and his yearning to become, as Eric puts it, "quantum dust, transcending his body mass, the soft tissue over the bones, the muscle and fat. The idea was to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void."

It helps, when writing about such people and their world, to know more about the subject than you can pick up leafing through a 1995 issue of Wired magazine at a garage sale. Perhaps it's not possible for an American man to write about an ostentatiously wealthy guy like Eric-who has a 48-room triplex at the top of the world's tallest residential tower, complete with rotating bedroom, lap pool, screening room, borzoi pen, two elevators (one timed to Erik Satie and the other to Sufi rap) a shark tank and, if Eric gets around to it, shooting range-without sounding like he's creating the alter ego of a comic-book superhero. Mr. DeLillo certainly hasn't proven it's possible here, that's for sure. Eric is also a polymath ("he mastered the steepest matters in half an afternoon") who studies Einstein's special theory in both German and English, reads poetry, contemplates the Middle English roots of the word "hangnail" and works out faithfully (a universal trait of the protagonists of cheap thrillers). People, especially women, are forever feeding him observations about himself, like slave girls dispensing peeled grapes; these are flattery disguised as reproaches. "I think you're dedicated to knowing," his wife says. "I think you acquire information and turn it into something stupendous and awful." He has sex with most of these women-and the less said about the sex scenes, the better.

Eric's great problem is that right now he can't figure out the valuation of the yen using his trademark method of comparing currency fluctuations with organic patterns. He's bet all his money on the yen collapsing and yet it keeps going up, and eventually he comes to embrace the growing peril to his fortune. He's being both self-destructive and vain, since he gets to take the whole world's economy with him on the way down. "He knew they would figure it out eventually, how he'd made it happen, one man, bereaved and tired now," he thinks while watching a broadcast of panicky economists addressed by the president of the World Bank. "You want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others," says his derelict nemesis.

Cosmopolis shows only the most superficial and cartoonish grasp of how people who work with technology think and live (as opposed to, say, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon , a vastly smarter novel). Mr. DeLillo's dialogue flickers between sub-Mamet choppiness ("You do this what." "What. Every day." "No matter." "Wherever I am. That's right. No matter") and preposterous philosophizing. The moral of the story, should you choose to accept it, is that trying to transcend our fleshly existence is perverse and misguided because, as Eric finally realizes, our bodies are integral to ourselves: "The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data." In other words, dehumanization is dehumanizing: Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.

Mr. DeLillo ought to take his own advice here. He doesn't really have much that's insightful or even persuasive to say about the acolytes of data or the lives of the very, very rich. Nothing, certainly, to match his acute observations about suburban life in White Noise or the domestic minuet from The Body Artist . Enough of the food for thought, thanks very much. We'd rather have breakfast.

Laura Miller is a senior writer at Salon .

In what's becoming a signature of Don DeLillo's fiction, The Body Artist begins with a tour de force that the remainder of the book can't quite live up to. ( Underworld , an entirely different sort of book, has the same structural quirk.) The first 18 pages describe a few hours in the life of a couple, Rey and Lauren, as they breakfast in a rented seaside house–a scene that seems utterly ordinary, despite its ominous introduction as "this final morning."

The couple's breakfast is as mundane as the 1951 baseball game that kicks off Underworld is legendary, but Mr. DeLillo handles it with the same reverence. This morning scene is a lovely, perfect rendering of domestic intimacy, the absent-minded dance of two people rummaging through drawers, pouring juice and turning the radio off and on; she pressing down the toaster lever a second time to make sure his bread gets properly browned, he borrowing her spoon to scoop out the flesh of a fig to spread on the toast, and she wordlessly leaning forward to take a bite. They converse distractedly, each remark staggering out after the speaker has already begun to think of something else: "She crossed to the cabinet and took down the box and then caught the fridge door before it swung shut. She reached in for the milk, realizing what it was he'd said that she hadn't heard about eight seconds ago."

At the same time, Lauren takes pains to notice things: "how water from the tap turned opaque in seconds. It ran silvery and clear and then in seconds turned opaque." She muses at length on the odor of the soya granules she sprinkles on her cereal, "somewhere between body odor, yes, in the lower extremities and some authentic podlife of the earth, deep and seeded. But that didn't describe it. She read a story in the paper about a child abandoned in some godforsaken. Nothing described it. It was pure smell. It was the thing that smell is, apart from all sources." She suffers regret when she forgets to taste a mouthful of her cereal and is transfixed by a blue jay perched on the feeder outside the window as she tries "to work past the details to the bird itself." This is Mr. DeLillo at his uncanny best. There's genius in the way he makes this morning so vivid: not by describing the world but by recording the way it registers on a human mind, specifically Lauren's, among drifting fragments of memory and imagined conversations with the people she reads about.

A newspaper clipping follows, explaining that Rey, a Spanish-born film director, has shot himself in the New York apartment of his first wife, and that Lauren is his third wife and a "body artist." In the next chapter, Lauren returns to the house, wandering from room to room, performing minor chores. She's still observant, but with a kind of soreness, so that when "the wax paper separated from the roll in rat-a-tat sequence, advancing along the notched edge of the box … she heard it along her spine." She is sunk in grief, unable to see the sky as she once did, as "soul extension, dumb guttural wonder," staring instead for hours at a live streaming-video feed from a camera trained on a quiet road in Kotka, Finland, because it is "real enough to withstand the circumstance of nothing going on. It thrived on the circumstance."

Then Lauren finds a man in an upstairs bedroom, a discovery that resolves the mystery of certain noises she's heard, noises that Rey also heard in the days before his death. The man is small, unthreatening and very strange, wearing only white boxers and a T-shirt and talking in a "halting," "self-taught" way. Instead of telephoning around to local mental hospitals or the police, she clothes and feeds him, studying him assiduously. The way he speaks, particularly his difficulty with tenses, fascinates her. She begins tape-recording their conversations. She hears "elements of her voice, the clipped delivery, the slight buzz deep in the throat, her pitch, her sound."

Even more unsettling, the nameless man begins to talk just like Rey, repeating swatches of conversations from weeks before: "This was not some communication with the dead. It was Rey alive in the course of a talk he'd had with her, in this room." This strange, small man (who she calls Mr. Tuttle, after a former teacher) "knew how to make her husband live in the air that rushed from his lungs." Part of Lauren believes that he has been hiding in the house, eavesdropping, but part of her begins to suspect that he exists outside of time: "His future is unnamed. It is simultaneous, somehow, with the present. Neither happens before or after the other and they are equally accessible."

The Body Artist grows increasingly enigmatic. Who is Lauren's peculiar guest? The sheen of moisture across his forehead and cheeks when she first finds him, his spindly body and large head, and Lauren's own inclination to bathe and feed him by hand, make him seem infantile, even fetal. That he carries Rey and Lauren's voices within him suggests that he's a revenant of their extinguished love, or a manifestation of Lauren's grief. Mr. DeLillo is not the sort of writer to provide obvious answers, but Lauren's encounters with Mr. Tuttle lead to much metaphysical and linguistic speculation: "There has to be an imaginary point, a nonplace where language intersects with our perceptions of time and space, and he is a stranger at this crossing, without words or bearings."

Like the dragon in a Chinese parade, The Body Artist is a spectacular head followed by a less impressive tail. After the riveting specificity of the breakfast scene, Lauren's philosophical ruminations and even the puzzle of the visiting homunculus feel unoriginal, the routine devices of modernist fiction. There are occasional flashes of DeLillo wizardry (an exquisite account of how it feels to register, from the fringe of perception, a paper clip falling off a desk, for example), but they make the rest of the novel feel vague and listless.

No one writes more exhilarating set-pieces than Mr. DeLillo, but he's not especially good with character and plot–something of a liability when it comes to writing novels. He doesn't really do dialogue; his people either chat aimlessly or launch into monologues, decanting data and theories. Solitude is their natural state. The most momentous conversation in The Body Artist , the one in which Lauren recognizes that Mr. Tuttle is parroting talks she's had with Rey–an opportunity for virtuoso writing if there ever was one–gets summarized rather than dramatized.

When Mr. DeLillo does conduct a foray into human interaction, he can be emotionally tone-deaf. In the middle of the novel, Rey's first wife, Isabel, telephones to tell Lauren that Rey's suicide was "a thing that was going to happen …. For years he was going to do this thing …. This man, it was not a question of chemicals in his brain. It was him who he was. Frankly you didn't have time to find out …. And I know exactly how his mind was working. He said to himself two things. This is a woman I know forever. And maybe she will not mind the mess." Mr. DeLillo handles the scene so perfunctorily that he seems oblivious to Isabel's terrible cruelty. For him, the conversation merely provides a way to dispense with prosaic questions about Rey's motives and Lauren's likely feelings of guilt so that he can move on to the abstractions that really interest him. How a young widow might feel to be told by her husband's first wife that she never really knew him, that she was merely a clueless latecomer–and what kind of vindictiveness would cause the first wife to say such a thing–seem to be matters of mere psychology beneath this author's notice. The trouble is, this time around Mr. DeLillo has chosen a theme–grief–that's stubbornly personal.

Precisely because it begins on so earthy a note, it's frustrating that The Body Artist dissipates into sterile philosophizing. No one but Mr. DeLillo could have written this novel's first 18 pages; the same can't be said for such sentences as this: "Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seams of being. It passes through you, making and shaping." An inclination to pontificate has always been this author's Achilles' heel, and more's the pity, because no one can match Mr. DeLillo when he's got both feet on the ground.

Laura Miller is the New York editorial director of Salon.

The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations , by Larry Tye. Crown Books, 320 pages, $27.50.

A publicist I know once compared flackery to tying fishing flies-a delicate, ingenious art charged at every stage with suspense: Will they bite? Public relations also resembles fly fishing in that its practitioners treat it like a science when, more often than not, it seems like voodoo. Edward Bernays-the would-be "Father of Public Relations," also known as the Prince of Puff and the Baron of Ballyhoo-strove mightily to lay out a systematic approach to his profession. He published 15 books, devised a famous eight-part formula for running a press campaign and agitated (in vain) for the licensing of what he dubbed "public relations counselors."

In the course of a career spanning more than 50 years, Bernays concocted some of the goofiest schemes ever for advancing his clients' interests, and got paid some of the most ridiculous sums for doing so. Finally, as a posthumous flourish, he has managed to confound his biographer, Larry Tye, who spends so much of The Father of Spin trying to sort out Bernays' self-glorifying hype from the simple facts that he never quite manages to get at the inner workings of Bernays' gift.

Just how significant was Bernays-who opened his first publicity office in 1919-in the founding of P.R. as a (debatably) legitimate profession? Really good question. Eric F. Goldman (a Princeton historian who later went on to become a top aide to President Lyndon Johnson and an L.B.J. biographer) wrote a history of P.R. in 1948, that crowned Bernays as the engineer of P.R.'s sophisticated "third stage," in which "the public was to be understood" (as opposed to merely "informed") and "Public relations was to be a two-way street-and a street in a good neighborhood." The problem is, as Mr. Tye discovered in sorting through the more than 800 boxes of personal and professional papers his subject bequeathed to the Library of Congress, Bernays had come up with the idea for Goldman's book, found it a publisher, "was deeply involved in the editing and packaging" and wound up purchasing all rights to the title.

Everywhere Mr. Tye turns, he's got to hack through the spinmeister's spin. Some P.R. titans insist that Bernays was a secondary influence on the field-maybe they're just peeved to see the unpopular Bernays overshadow his contemporaries. Without a doubt, he crafted some of the profession's most legendary early campaigns. Or did he? Well, Bernays can , it seems, take full credit for the 1929 "Torches of Freedom" stunt, which Mr. Tye describes as "a classic in the world of public relations, one still cited in classrooms and boardrooms as an example of ballyhoo at its most brilliant and, more important, of creative analysis of social symbols and how they can be manipulated." To help the American Tobacco Company in its quest to recruit more female smokers, Bernays wanted to attack the lingering taboo against women smoking in the streets. Using his secretary (posing as a crusader "not connected with any firm") as a front, he assembled a group of defiant but elegant ladies to march down Fifth Avenue, lit cigarettes in hand, on Easter Sunday.

"Torches of Freedom" was trademark Bernays: It involved enlisting prominent, respected figures (debutantes and the wife of columnist Heywood Broun) in support of a "news event" that showed no traceable connection to Bernays' client. Before coming up with the idea, Bernays had consulted the psychoanalyst A.A. Brill, who observed that cigarettes, to women, signaled "emancipation." Bernays carefully orchestrated the march, and even provided his own photographers in case the newspapers failed to get good pictures.

He took credit for another "classic" event, also in 1929: "Light's Golden Jubilee," the 50th anniversary of Thomas Edison's invention of the electric light. Bernays, working for General Electric, helped promote a ceremony involving Edison and presided over by Henry Ford. But some historians (including Mr. Tye) tend to think Bernays "embellished" the importance of his role. In fact, he so irritated Ford with his attempts to squeeze his way into group photos that the magnate threatened to have the press agent thrown over a fence.

No one contests that Bernays devised the stupendously daffy "Green Ball" campaign, also for American Tobacco; they just argue about how effective it was. Still trying to up the number of female nicotine fiends, the company found that ladies avoided its Lucky Strike brand because the package color-green-clashed with their clothes. Since the cantankerous head of American Tobacco refused to change the package, Bernays promised to change the clothes. In an effort to install green as fashion's favorite color, Bernays convinced a socialite to throw a emerald-themed charity ball; he persuaded the president of a fabric company to host a luncheon featuring green food and a talk by an art professor on "Green in the Work of Great Artists."

Bernays' most significant propagandizing was for the United Fruit Company during the early 1950's. United Fruit found Guatemala's new and uncooperatively leftist government irksome. Bernays was hired to convince Americans that the possibility of a Communist revolution in Guatemala merited U.S. support for the 1954 takeover by a military junta. According to Mr. Tye, Bernays stayed in constant touch with The New York Times (where he was tight with the publisher and several editors) and other major news outlets, feeding them inside information and even flying a passel of journalists down to the Central American nation for a two-week tour, all on United Fruit's dime. Bernays tirelessly worked to slant coverage of Guatemala's impending crisis in his client's favor and, Mr. Tye notes, "a surprising number of respected reporters seemed not to know or care about that orchestration or about the fact that Bernays worked for a firm with huge economic interests at stake. What mattered was that his releases were filled with facts they could quickly transform into stories."

Bernays' personal life also proves a head-scratcher, although in many ways he was a typical self-made midcentury man: work-obsessed, dictatorial, emotionally stunted. (After the death of his beloved wife and helpmate of 58 years, Mr. Tye writes, "Bernays read Elizabeth Kübler-Ross' book on grief and insisted that he'd passed through all the stages in the course of two days.") And for a guy notorious for his powers of persuasion, he sure managed to alienate a lot of people in his 103 years. Part of the P.R. man's grandiose claim to psychological acumen lay in a blood tie so apropos that he couldn't have rigged it better himself: He was Freud's nephew. The connection was close, and Bernays actively lobbied to get Freud's A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis published in the United States. He also dropped Uncle Sigi's name so often that Variety called him a "professional nephew."

Mr. Tye writes that Bernays "was as driven as his uncle to know what subconscious forces motivated people, and he used Freud's writing to help him understand." But it's never clear that Bernays relied on anything more developed than gut instinct. The Father of Spin is disappointingly thin when it come to deep thinking. Tantalizing hints include Bernays' strict instructions that the Torch of Freedom marchers be attractive but "not look too 'model-y,'" and that at least some of them be accompanied by men. Mr. Tye (and, we can only assume, Bernays) never says why these symbolic details were so crucial.

Bernays wrote: "The public's ability to create its own heroes from wisps of impressions and its own imagination and to build them almost into flesh-and-blood gods fascinated me." But he was more than fascinated: He had every intention of harnessing that deifying impulse for his own ends. (Bernays worked on a couple of political campaigns, with mixed results.) If he ever attempted to dissect how the process of myth-making works, Mr. Tye doesn't let on. Our media-dazed world-where, say, one politician can shrug off scandal after scandal while another can't survive being videotaped in a tank-feels more and more like a realm of pure totem and taboo. Maybe Bernays knew how to work some powerful juju, but his biographer isn't giving away any of his tricks.

If living in the digital future is anything like reading Esther Dyson's book about it, I don't think I'll be able to stay awake for the experience. Ms. Dyson owns a company, Edventure Holdings Inc., that publishes a newsletter ( Release 1.0 ) about technology trends and puts on conferences for high-tech movers and shakers, including the exclusive PC Forum. She's part of a relatively new breed of pundit promising to give nervous businessmen a handle on the unpredictable, swiftly evolving, mandarin world of high technology. The less people understand about a powerful force, the more likely they are to manufacture cults of personality around those who seem to have an inside line, which is how Nicholas Negroponte managed to sell so many copies of his pompous and silly book, Being Digital , and why Ms. Dyson got an advance of more than a million dollars for this soporific Design for Living in the Digital Age .

In her introduction to Release 2.0 , Ms. Dyson writes that the intent of her book is "to help us think about the Internet and our roles as citizens, rule-makers and community members." The Net, she explains, "is a potential home for all of us ... a place where people meet, talk, do business, find out things, form committees, and pass on rumors." For the rest of the book's 307 pages, Ms. Dyson continues, in this bland and measured tone, to weigh in on various Internet quandaries--pornography, spam (junk e-mail), intellectual property rights and, especially, electronic commerce. She's a moderate libertarian who believes that "markets will do a lot of the design if we let them, but we need a foundation of both traditional, or terrestrial, and Net-based rules to make the markets work properly." Few of her positions seem likely to provoke the kind of flaming debate for which the Net is notorious, and when she does prescribe something drastic--like the death of copyright--she does it in the mild, reasonable voice of technocrat managers everywhere.

In a way, Ms. Dyson is an example of the curse inherent in getting what you wished for. The first prophets of the digital future were early adapters, mostly former hippies, and were prone to the grandiosity and "revolutionary" junk rhetoric of the 60's counterculture. They talked a lot of nonsense about the death of literature, the hive-mind and screenagers, got brain-trust jobs at Wired magazine and discovered that the more outlandish their predictions and pontifications, the more easily they could scare corporate managers into paying them hefty consulting fees for their goofy pronouncements. To be fair, they did foster one industry--a minor boom of inner-Luddite authors who wrote long, earnest, hand-wringing treatises on how the Internet spells the end of civilization as we know it. Another former hippie, Kirkpatrick Sale, even took his Cassandra act on the road, smashing computers with a baseball bat during public appearances and reaffirming that his is the Generation That Knows No Shame when it comes to the pursuit of media attention. Meanwhile, the press went wild with horror stories about the child molesters, hackers, sexual harassers and other sociopaths supposedly lurking in every dark recess of the Net.

In short, it's been a three-ring circus, and I remember how most of the people who early on had found the Net interesting, fun and useful would yearn for a less inflammatory public discussion of its potential. Now comes Esther Dyson to make us rue the day we did. The bonanza mentality that once prevailed in the corporate world's attitude toward the Net has been tempered with skepticism, and their tolerance for wild-eyed visionaries has been exhausted. They prefer now to hear about the future from one of their own (Ms. Dyson was once a securities analyst and used to work at Forbes ), in the language and terms that make them comfortable, a soothing vocabulary--composed of words like "innovation," "productivity" and "outsourcing"--that can cloak the most ruthless strategies and appalling events in a mantle of placid euphemism. Compared to the Net's early champions and critics, Ms. Dyson sounds like the voice of reason, but she's also depressingly lacking in passion. Release 2.0 has all the pizzazz and sense of adventure of an in-flight magazine.

The book offers a series of scenarios--entitled "Communities," "Work," "Education," "Governance" and so on--illustrating how Ms. Dyson expects the Net will reshape various areas of our lives. It's a vision of the world common in libertarians, in which all students are industrious, all employers judicious, all consumers well informed and every citizen exercises his or her freedom of choice and speech with the rationality of a Vulcan--as long as the noxious forces of centralized government and excessive regulation are kept at bay.

Well, actually, there may still be a few hate groups and con men and slanderers and unsocialized wackos out there, but a complex, grass-roots system of social and commercial shunning will, Ms. Dyson assures us, keep them from running amok. Individuals and companies will thrive or fail on the basis of reputation. "Better communications, Net versions of best-10 lists, consumer ratings and overall visibility will cause investors, managers, employees, and customers to gravitate to good companies; they will flee from bad or ineffective ones." How simple--unless you're one of the unfortunate pioneers who discovers first-hand that an unregulated meatpacking plant or automobile manufacturer has been cutting corners, in which case I suppose you could take comfort in knowing that your personal loss will eventually become the free market's gain.

Release 2.0 suffers from such idiocies because Ms. Dyson, like many of the so-called "digerati," is too deeply embedded in the high-tech sub-economy to understand that much of the rest of the world doesn't work that way and never will. "Just as the pace at which you live your individual work life will speed up," she chirps blithely, "so will the pace at which companies are created, grow, and disappear … The good news is that this 'Darwinism' applies more to companies than to people. Bad companies die or get absorbed, but with luck their employees learn something and move on to better companies." So far, that's been true in Silicon Valley, where the workers in question are highly skilled, well paid and still fairly young. It's an acceptable way for the software industry to run, but try translating Ms. Dyson's model to agriculture, or mining, or the manufacturing of durable goods. It just doesn't compute.

Her editors (no doubt thinking of the kind of sales needed to recoup that advance) probably urged her to make Release 2.0 accessible. As a result, people in the technology industry will find the book too elementary to be of any real use, while the unwired will wind up bewildered by it. But, while Broadway Books may wind up stung in this deal, Ms. Dyson probably won't. A recent Vanity Fair profile of her quotes her father, the physicist Freeman Dyson, dismissing her monthly newsletter thus: "I'm always surprised that people pay so much for so little." Beyond displaying the kind of parenting that helped make his daughter the automatonlike workaholic depicted in the profile, Mr. Dyson misses the point. A $695-per-year subscription to Release 1.0 provides access to PC Forum, an event where talent connects with money and vice versa. Ms. Dyson's real skill lies in hooking people up, not in her ideas, so don't expect anyone in the industry to publicly confess to the widespread opinion that Release 2.0 is stale and vague. Chances are they're indebted to Ms. Dyson for a past introduction, or hoping for an advantageous one in the future.