“I have the distinct pleasure … ,” he began in his droll, circumlocutory, Austrian-sounding speech. “I think today is a good day to say ‘pleasure’: I’m sitting between Esther Perel on my right, and Laura Kipnis on my left—I’m feeling like a very happy man today. We’re here to talk about a very serious subject—lust—but before I explore, explode the subject …. ” Then he went on to explain how the session would end: The admonitory opening flourish of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony would interrupt the ensuing colloquy, alerting him and us that 45 minutes (“the length of a psychiatric session,” Mr. Holdengräber said) had elapsed.

Ms. Kipnis and Ms. Perel are two recently minted experts in that perennial subject of journalistic concern: What Do Women Want? And though they spent parts of the session impugning the basic assumptions of each other’s work, they have many things in common.

Ms. Perel is the author of Mating in Captivity, a therapeutic book with an edge that recommends, among other things, fantasy re-enactments of “forced seduction” as a marital aid. Ms. Kipnis is the author of Against Love: A Polemic and, more recently, The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability. Both of them parse out the highly contested meanings of sex, love, lust, marriage, romance and adultery in the postmodern, post-feminist age; both of them have a flair for the aphoristic; both stand opposed to the tiresome, indeed destructive, cant of other doctors, pundits and political activists who have taken up the subject before them. Each purports to speak forbidden truths that every honest woman knows.

These, of course, are the obligatory moves by which any would-be bold new voice conscripts itself to the very agenda it denounces (that of continuing a noisy and unedifying pseudo-controversy in the pages of our quality magazines)—which is not to say that either of them lack wit or say only things that are untrue. Poked and prodded by the deliciously hammy Mr. Holdengräber, who runs the library’s public-education program, the two put on a spirited performance that kept the audience engrossed and amused.

The audience consisted of tasteful couples d’un certain age whose attendance at such an event might be interpreted by a smart-alecky observer as a tacit confession. Interspersed in their midst were handfuls of younger, sensitive New Age guys accompanied by the kind of cashmere-clad, carefully groomed women you imagine enunciating with rapid-fire precision around a handsomely varnished seminar table at a college in New England. Ms. Kipnis and Ms. Perel’s provocative rhetorical salvoes had the appealing virtue of resembling genuine thought, without ever quite attaining it.

Ms. Kipnis began: “Will all the adulterers in the room please stand up?”

When no one dared take a stand, Ms. Perel said. “Will all those who have ever thought about adultery please stand up?”

A voice from the front row asked, “Can we just raise our hands?”

Ms. Perel then went on to marvel, in her toothsome French-Israeli accent, that Americans tolerate multiple divorces and remarriages but have “a great intolerance for the concept of renegotiating boundaries for adultery.” This intolerance emerges, Ms. Perel said, from a peculiarly modern—and a peculiarly American—idealism about relationships.

“It feeds into the idea that there is one relationship that can be for everything,” she said. “And if you find out that this relationship isn’t going to do that for you, you will opt out and say, ‘I chose the wrong person and will now look for the person who can really give me everything’—instead of questioning the structure of the relationship.”

Against this model, Ms. Perel made a case for the kind of adultery that can save a marriage.

“Some affairs are the death knell for a gasping relationship that was already on its way out,” Ms. Perel said. “But for many others, it’s the alarm that gets people reinvigorated and re-engaged—nothing like the threat of loss to get people interested in each other again, sexually or otherwise.”

Mr. Holdengräber then asked Ms. Kipnis if Against Love—which advances the quasi-Marxisant (Althusserian, to be precise) notion that modern monogamy, requiring endless work and the intervention of outside experts, is a form of voluntary collective imprisonment—was a pro-adultery polemic. In an oft-quoted passage, she described what she called the “domestic gulag,” spelling out, over eight pages, all the things she can no longer do as a married woman. Ms. Kipnis said that we might think of adultery as a kind of inchoate protest, expressing a “basic utopian impulse” for “something more.”

“Adultery doesn’t need me to be its proponent,” Ms. Kipnis said. “It’s doing quite well on its own.”

“But,” Mr. Holdengräber shot back, “I think it gains some momentum with you behind it!”

Mr. Holdengräber pressed Ms. Perel to explain whether the adultery she advocated was theoretical or active.

“Does the erotic only mean when people have had sex?” Ms. Perel asked. “People can sit with each other like this and discuss books and ideas and be in a completely erotic experience.”

“Indeed, indeed,” Mr. Holdengräber replied. “No, no, I completely agree.”

“I didn’t mean to implicate you!” Ms. Perel said.

“But why not?” asked Mr. Holdengräber. “Well—I’m sorry you don’t want to.”

Ms. Kipnis brought her skepticism to bear on the edifice of what she called the “therapy-industrial complex”: “Can you teach lust or desire at the point at which people go to these consultations?” she asked. “The flogging of something dead in order to instill some iota of life in order to perpetuate it—it’s hard for me to imagine a joyful sort of work of that sort. Is desire renewable?”

“It may look like I’m just another representative of my field, but I am actually a bomb within my field,” said Ms. Perel. “I’m just throwing over a lot of sacred cows and assumptions that have gone unexamined.” Chief among the cows she’s flayed is the therapeutic belief that “intimacy begets sexual desire.” To the contrary, Ms. Perel argued, intimacy and love can sometimes serve as an obstacle to the expression of sexual desire, which is “much more selfish, much more raw, much more objectifying, much less into that caring, protective element—which can be why it is harder to lust in the same place you look for stability and connection.”

The balance of the evening went to Ms. Perel. Mr. Holdengräber seemed to favor her, and every point that Ms. Kipnis made was met with a well-rehearsed speech from Ms. Perel, or with aggressive questioning by Mr. Holdengräber.

“There are all sorts of industries that thrive on trying to solve the problem of declining marital desire, from therapy to sex toys. The therapy-industrial complex is dedicated to producing optimism about this situation,” Ms. Kipnis said early on.

“But what about if Esther is actually helping people?” said Mr. Holdengräber.

“I do!” said Ms. Perel.

“If I was getting $250 an hour, I could produce optimism on demand, too!” Ms. Kipnis shot back.

“You mean because you are paid less, you are not inclined … ,” began Mr. Holdengräber.

“Far less,” said Ms. Kipnis.

“Maybe that’s why you’re not optimistic,” Mr. Holdengräber said.

Ms. Perel’s book is a glib masterpiece of absorption, repackaging the insights of D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer into sharp, simple aphorisms for the consumption of a therapeutic readership. Mostly she talked about the tension between adventure and security, and the difficulty of preserving mystery and imagination.

But her “edgier” insights were meant to tell educated, post-feminist men and women the kind of arguably retrograde things that popular entertainment has never ceased to revel in. Which is not to say they’re wrong.

“The democratic values that we cherish in the workplace and in many parts of our relationship don’t always work that way, erotically speaking,” Ms. Perel said. “Neutralizing all power differentials can be contrary to the way that desire operates. There is an element of aggression—that wanting, that hostility, that conquering urge—that is not allowed anymore in the equalizing, egalitarian model,” she added.

“We don’t want to go back to the way things were. But you may want the egalitarian model between 6 to 8 p.m. in the kitchen, and something else in the bedroom after 10 p.m.”

The ultimate paradox, however, of Ms. Perel’s paradox-laden book is the tidiness with which its paeans to ruthlessness, risk and the uncontainable power of the erotic are delivered. She quotes a sex therapist advocating rape fantasies as “healthy dominance and powerful surrender.” In this way, she makes the dangerous safe for all of us who want to derive the benefits of risk-taking without actually exposing ourselves to any potential harm—and all under the beneficent tutelage of a dynamic, well-spoken and fetching European therapist. It seemed an offer that few with the means to accept would want to refuse.

Ms. Kipnis seemed to concur. “I’ve written a lot in The Female Thing about how gender equality, in political and social terms, got mapped onto questions of sexuality such that a demand for men to be more like women became, in America, a kind of political demand. And female desire is much more complicated than that. We are dealing with the confusion.”

At one point toward the end, Ms. Kipnis conceded that for all her fire-breathing polemic against love, she has always been, in fact, and remains a romantic. “I’m intensely romantic,” Ms. Kipnis said. “Too romantic.”

A summary of the afternoon’s back-and-forth might be spelled out as a set of pointers to men like this: Be nice, but not too nice; talk to us, but don’t get mired in everyday triviality; be nurturing, but not smothering; and whatever else you do, however much you respect and treat us like equals in all other settings, in the bedroom, don’t you dare forget to throw us down onto the covers, or up against the wall.

Seymour Hersh and Scott Ritter did not disappoint. Mr. Ritter is a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990’s who turned against the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq War. His new book, Target Iran, uses the foreign press and Mr. Ritter’s undisclosed intelligence contacts to describe American and Israeli preparations for war with that country. He continually roused himself to a fury and drew volleys of cathartic applause.

“There will be war with Iran,” he declared. “If we start bombing Iran, I’ll tell you right now, it’s not going to work …. What will happen is that the Iranians will respond and we will feel the pain instantaneously, which will cause the Bush administration to go to Phase 2, which will be boots on the ground.

“And those troops could end up trapped in Iraq.” His voice swelled. “And there is no reserve to pull them out! And my concern at that point is that we might resort to the use of nuclear weapons to try to break the backbone of Iranian resistance.”

He concluded: “If we do, the genie ain’t going back into the bottle until at least one American city is taken out. So tell me—which one do you want gone? Seattle? Los Angeles? Boston? New York? Pick one, because at least one is going.”

Mr. Hersh, the New Yorker writer, delivered, as he often does, a tidbit that probably won’t make it into print. He described a long private e-mail written by someone who works with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to its generals. It explained the dangers of striking Iran and ended with a facetious prescription for the way forward in Iraq.

“We should say we’re really, really, really sorry, and we really, really, really are,” Mr. Hersh began. “Let’s get Saddam Hussein, put him in a prayer meeting with President Bush, tell Halliburton it can do reconstruction—let’s take a mulligan and get the hell out of there.”

Left-wing New York had gathered at the Society for Ethical Culture the Wednesday before as well. That night it was Salman Rushdie, the proverbial canary in the mineshaft of the great political tsuris threatening to engulf the 21st century. The people were there to hear religion calumniated by a puckish wit who had seen its darkest edge pressed against his throat. The people that were out to get him are out to get the rest of us, too.

These people, Mr. Rushdie argued, ought to be called “Islamic terrorists.” “If the terrorists themselves are saying they are doing what they are doing in the name of Islam, then I see no reason why we shouldn’t put those two words together to describe the world as it is,” he said.

Liberal German Jews who thought even Reform Judaism was too godly for them started Ethical Culture in the 1870’s. The rows of wooden benches that you would, in a different setting, call “pews” are presided over by nontheistic sculptures of a woman in a flowing gown holding a baby.

“They should put a sign around that baby’s neck,” said the man seated behind me, “that reads, ‘I AM NOT THE BABY JESUS.’” The bearded fellow, a tax attorney on business from California, was in good spirits. “It’s the closest I’ve ever been,” he noted, “to an atheistic church.”

Ethical Culture is, in other words, le plus bien of all the bien pensant milieus in this city, and Mr. Rushdie had come to explain to these people an error that he thinks they and others like them had made. Out of friendliness to Third World movements that deploy the rhetoric of liberation, Mr. Rushdie said, many liberals and progressives had failed to see them with the proper clarity.

He sprang to his own defense over a stray comment that recently hit the press. He had said that the veil wasn’t an icon of identity, but something that Muslim men bullied young women to wear. In a word, that it “sucked.”

“Islamic radicalism—whether it’s Al Qaeda, Wahhabism or whatever—is not interested in creating greater social justice,” he said later. “It’s interested in what the Taliban did. It’s interested in a new religious, fascist rule over the planet.”

Karl Marx is often quoted calling religion the opiate of the people. They often leave out the sentence that precedes it: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” An unstated subtext of the evening’s triumphant secularism was that religion and identity are the refuges of people with little else going for them.

“Flood them with iPods and let MTV save the world!” Mr. Rushdie declared, half-facetiously, about the means to the end of Islamic theocracy in Iran. It is the liberal dream, glibly stated, and it seemed to indicate the place where Mr. Rushdie’s fine, educated, cosmopolitan sensibility met its limit.

For a pensive moment toward the evening’s end, he no longer seemed to be pronouncing or delivering his tightly honed aperçus. Maybe, he said, if the world’s wealth were more evenly distributed, fewer would be inclined to wage war against it. “Marxism is so out of fashion these days,” he noted. But.

He seemed a bit wistful and tentative at this moment, and though it’s hard to know what an audience thinks, others seemed to share in the mood.

All these fortunate people, most had less than Mr. Rushdie, but most had, by any absolute standard, a very great deal.

They could imagine how hard it might be to grow up poor and despised in some backward corner of the earth, and could maybe even see how you might end up being cross with the world. All of their deepest convictions had been directed toward the amelioration of just these conditions—but not enough had been done, and a terrible storm seemed about to be unleashed upon them. And despite Mr. Rushdie’s rousing peroration, in which he called on us to defend our liberties against those who would take them from us (not through war, but through renewed commitment), it was by no means clear that we could get ourselves on the right side of what we sensed was coming.

Seymour Hersh and Scott Ritter did not disappoint. Mr. Ritter is a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990’s who turned against the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq War. His new book, Target Iran, uses the foreign press and Mr. Ritter’s undisclosed intelligence contacts to describe American and Israeli preparations for war with that country. He continually roused himself to a fury and drew volleys of cathartic applause.

“There will be war with Iran,” he declared. “If we start bombing Iran, I’ll tell you right now, it’s not going to work …. What will happen is that the Iranians will respond and we will feel the pain instantaneously, which will cause the Bush administration to go to Phase 2, which will be boots on the ground.

“And those troops could end up trapped in Iraq.” His voice swelled. “And there is no reserve to pull them out! And my concern at that point is that we might resort to the use of nuclear weapons to try to break the backbone of Iranian resistance.”

He concluded: “If we do, the genie ain’t going back into the bottle until at least one American city is taken out. So tell me—which one do you want gone? Seattle? Los Angeles? Boston? New York? Pick one, because at least one is going.”

Mr. Hersh, the New Yorker writer, delivered, as he often does, a tidbit that probably won’t make it into print. He described a long private e-mail written by someone who works with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to its generals. It explained the dangers of striking Iran and ended with a facetious prescription for the way forward in Iraq.

“We should say we’re really, really, really sorry, and we really, really, really are,” Mr. Hersh began. “Let’s get Saddam Hussein, put him in a prayer meeting with President Bush, tell Halliburton it can do reconstruction—let’s take a mulligan and get the hell out of there.”

Left-wing New York had gathered at the Society for Ethical Culture the Wednesday before as well. That night it was Salman Rushdie, the proverbial canary in the mineshaft of the great political tsuris threatening to engulf the 21st century. The people were there to hear religion calumniated by a puckish wit who had seen its darkest edge pressed against his throat. The people that were out to get him are out to get the rest of us, too.

These people, Mr. Rushdie argued, ought to be called “Islamic terrorists.” “If the terrorists themselves are saying they are doing what they are doing in the name of Islam, then I see no reason why we shouldn’t put those two words together to describe the world as it is,” he said.

Liberal German Jews who thought even Reform Judaism was too godly for them started Ethical Culture in the 1870’s. The rows of wooden benches that you would, in a different setting, call “pews” are presided over by nontheistic sculptures of a woman in a flowing gown holding a baby.

“They should put a sign around that baby’s neck,” said the man seated behind me, “that reads, ‘I AM NOT THE BABY JESUS.’” The bearded fellow, a tax attorney on business from California, was in good spirits. “It’s the closest I’ve ever been,” he noted, “to an atheistic church.”

Ethical Culture is, in other words, le plus bien of all the bien pensant milieus in this city, and Mr. Rushdie had come to explain to these people an error that he thinks they and others like them had made. Out of friendliness to Third World movements that deploy the rhetoric of liberation, Mr. Rushdie said, many liberals and progressives had failed to see them with the proper clarity.

He sprang to his own defense over a stray comment that recently hit the press. He had said that the veil wasn’t an icon of identity, but something that Muslim men bullied young women to wear. In a word, that it “sucked.”

“Islamic radicalism—whether it’s Al Qaeda, Wahhabism or whatever—is not interested in creating greater social justice,” he said later. “It’s interested in what the Taliban did. It’s interested in a new religious, fascist rule over the planet.”

Karl Marx is often quoted calling religion the opiate of the people. They often leave out the sentence that precedes it: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” An unstated subtext of the evening’s triumphant secularism was that religion and identity are the refuges of people with little else going for them.

“Flood them with iPods and let MTV save the world!” Mr. Rushdie declared, half-facetiously, about the means to the end of Islamic theocracy in Iran. It is the liberal dream, glibly stated, and it seemed to indicate the place where Mr. Rushdie’s fine, educated, cosmopolitan sensibility met its limit.

For a pensive moment toward the evening’s end, he no longer seemed to be pronouncing or delivering his tightly honed aperçus. Maybe, he said, if the world’s wealth were more evenly distributed, fewer would be inclined to wage war against it. “Marxism is so out of fashion these days,” he noted. But.

He seemed a bit wistful and tentative at this moment, and though it’s hard to know what an audience thinks, others seemed to share in the mood.

All these fortunate people, most had less than Mr. Rushdie, but most had, by any absolute standard, a very great deal.

They could imagine how hard it might be to grow up poor and despised in some backward corner of the earth, and could maybe even see how you might end up being cross with the world. All of their deepest convictions had been directed toward the amelioration of just these conditions—but not enough had been done, and a terrible storm seemed about to be unleashed upon them. And despite Mr. Rushdie’s rousing peroration, in which he called on us to defend our liberties against those who would take them from us (not through war, but through renewed commitment), it was by no means clear that we could get ourselves on the right side of what we sensed was coming.

“There are some pretty shocking things in there, some pretty startling things,” the usher told her, smiling. “But probably no.” From behind the curtain, and above the spooky synthesizer washes, came screams for help, howls of pain, crazed laughter. The usher pursed her lips, seeming to consider: “I think you’ll be O.K.”

Then the tall, burly man in the black cloak with the hood appeared. His orotund voice boomed and rasped. “Welcome, ladies and gentleman. I’ve been expecting you. We’re all going to have so much fun tonight at our … Hell House!”

When you heard that the avant-garde theater group Les Freres Corbusier would be staging a Hell House at the avant-garde theater space St. Ann’s Warehouse, you wondered what they meant by it and how it would go over.

The night began with a gang rape. In the first room, one of nine we walked through, “Jessica” isn’t having the best time at her first rave. But look, there’s like this “totally hot guy” that’s “totally checking her out.” The hot guy, “Chad,” can see Jessica isn’t entirely comfortable—and he wants to help. “Try one of these,” he says, offering her a little pill. “It will relax you.”

Moments later, Jessica’s sprawled on the floor. “She’s out,” declares Chad, whipping off his shirt. “Let’s rape her!”

The Reverend Jerry Falwell first dreamed up the Hell House in the 1970’s as a way to scare kids away from sin and back into the arms of Christ. Colorado Pastor Keenan Roberts began selling Hell House kits—scripts, stage directions and a soundtrack are available for $200—back in 1996. Roberts claims that more than 3,000 churches stage Hell Houses every year.

Les Freres Corbusier used one kit to create a perfect replica. A disclaimer of sorts had been tacked up next to the ticket window: “THIS AUTHENTIC DEPICTION OF A HELL HOUSE IS MEANT TO EDUCATE AND INFORM ABOUT A PARTICULAR RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT, NOT TO ENDORSE ANY SPECIFIC IDEOLOGY.”

One thing, however, was clear. Merely by sticking faithfully (as it were) to the script—by playing it (as it were) straight—Les Freres Corbusier has unleashed the edgiest entertainment to be had anywhere in the city. Not since the Meese Commission Report on Pornography has so much stagy titillation been collected in one place.

St. Ann’s Warehouse is a converted space amid picturesque post-industrial ruins by the waterfront under the Manhattan Bridge. At Sunday night’s opening, smatterings of smartly attired hipsters clustered at the candlelit tables in the enormous high-ceilinged waiting area and took a moment to parse out their stance toward what awaited them. Many motives were present. They were prepared to be giddy, but also to be frightened. By turns, they were appalled but curious, jaded sensation-seekers looking for a dose of high camp, or concerned liberals anxious to see at first hand what the red states think of them. The ambivalence made the room vibrate with a queasy intensity.

“I’m mostly here to see a freak show,” conceded Amy Slonaker, a 34-year-old lawyer and record collector. “But it also does actually dovetail with some of my intellectual interests,” she said, interlocking her fingers together to illustrate the connection. Ms. Slonaker grew up in an Evangelical Christian family in Santa Barbara, Calif., and studied religion in college. “I decided that it was all bullshit in junior high school,” Ms. Slonaker continued, “but I just kind of kept quiet and didn’t rock the boat until I could finally escape.”

Later, a clearly shaken Charles Mee, the playwright, stopped for a moment to reflect on what he had just seen. “First of all,” he began, “it’s amazing …. The very thought that this is a play that thousands of people see and take seriously is almost unbelievable. You don’t believe the text unless you already believe the context. It just seems stupid and preposterous and not funny—just appallingly unbelievable and unpersuasive.”

In one scene, a doctor wearing a yarmulke withholds treatment from a once-catatonic woman whose feeding tube has just been ripped from her throat. The woman has sprung back to life, but the doctor is unmoved.

“And so then you have to think as a left-winger,” Mr. Mee continued. “Is all of our left-wing theater equally unpersuasive unless you already believe, unless it’s confirming your prejudice? Is it really funny for somebody in the theater to just say the words ‘George W. Bush’?”

Brian Dooda, a 29-year-old theater archivist who lives in Greenpoint, was more blithe. “I’m definitely here to laugh,” he said. “But listen, I think this is probably something that even the evangelical kids laugh at.”

Irony is not, by its nature, a thing that can die; to declare the death of irony is to make yourself its fool. But something can happen to irony when you lose a stable point of reference from which to distinguish, say, an anti-gay screed from high camp, or anti-pornography crusading from pornography itself, or Christian proselytizing from the darkest blasphemy.

Later on in Hell House, we see a high-school cheerleader laid out on a stretcher in her uniform, complete with pom-poms. She is drenched in blood. There is blood splattered on the wall and on the scrubs of the doctor, who smokes a cigarette as he cues up the vacuum cleaner. We move into a red womb and see large aluminum forceps extract a girl dressed as a fetus from the birth canal.

Finally, we are taken on a guided tour of Hell. Wailing, lamentations, shrieks. A man grabs me by the arm. “He told me I was born gay, and I believed them!” he shouts. “Allah told me to blow up the subway!” screams a man with an Indian accent. “He said that was what I should do, and I believed him. But I was wrong, so wrong!” A man in a tuxedo lisps out a flamboyant show tune: He’s on his way to his wedding. He’s in Hell, but why isn’t he suffering? We laugh and laugh—we can’t help but laugh.

Then we found ourselves in a room filled with light arrayed with white curtains. A bearded man in a white robe appears wearing a beatific expression. It’s an actor pretending to be an actor pretending to be Jesus. His amateurish delivery is a sign of his very professionalism. But after all the din and all the chortling we had done, the words he spoke cast a sudden hush around the room—and even in the presence of all these unbelievers, you felt something move in you to be with these other people and hear kindly words and fair promises declaimed. It was perhaps the most insidious moment of all.

“If you believe with your whole heart that I was raised from the dead, and you confess with your mouth that I am the Lord,” the actor pretending to be an actor pretending to be Jesus assured us, “you will be saved. And your name will be written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, and every single person whose name is in that book will spend eternity with me in Heaven.”

“There are some pretty shocking things in there, some pretty startling things,” the usher told her, smiling. “But probably no.” From behind the curtain, and above the spooky synthesizer washes, came screams for help, howls of pain, crazed laughter. The usher pursed her lips, seeming to consider: “I think you’ll be O.K.”

Then the tall, burly man in the black cloak with the hood appeared. His orotund voice boomed and rasped. “Welcome, ladies and gentleman. I’ve been expecting you. We’re all going to have so much fun tonight at our … Hell House!”

When you heard that the avant-garde theater group Les Freres Corbusier would be staging a Hell House at the avant-garde theater space St. Ann’s Warehouse, you wondered what they meant by it and how it would go over.

The night began with a gang rape. In the first room, one of nine we walked through, “Jessica” isn’t having the best time at her first rave. But look, there’s like this “totally hot guy” that’s “totally checking her out.” The hot guy, “Chad,” can see Jessica isn’t entirely comfortable—and he wants to help. “Try one of these,” he says, offering her a little pill. “It will relax you.”

Moments later, Jessica’s sprawled on the floor. “She’s out,” declares Chad, whipping off his shirt. “Let’s rape her!”

The Reverend Jerry Falwell first dreamed up the Hell House in the 1970’s as a way to scare kids away from sin and back into the arms of Christ. Colorado Pastor Keenan Roberts began selling Hell House kits—scripts, stage directions and a soundtrack are available for $200—back in 1996. Roberts claims that more than 3,000 churches stage Hell Houses every year.

Les Freres Corbusier used one kit to create a perfect replica. A disclaimer of sorts had been tacked up next to the ticket window: “THIS AUTHENTIC DEPICTION OF A HELL HOUSE IS MEANT TO EDUCATE AND INFORM ABOUT A PARTICULAR RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT, NOT TO ENDORSE ANY SPECIFIC IDEOLOGY.”

One thing, however, was clear. Merely by sticking faithfully (as it were) to the script—by playing it (as it were) straight—Les Freres Corbusier has unleashed the edgiest entertainment to be had anywhere in the city. Not since the Meese Commission Report on Pornography has so much stagy titillation been collected in one place.

St. Ann’s Warehouse is a converted space amid picturesque post-industrial ruins by the waterfront under the Manhattan Bridge. At Sunday night’s opening, smatterings of smartly attired hipsters clustered at the candlelit tables in the enormous high-ceilinged waiting area and took a moment to parse out their stance toward what awaited them. Many motives were present. They were prepared to be giddy, but also to be frightened. By turns, they were appalled but curious, jaded sensation-seekers looking for a dose of high camp, or concerned liberals anxious to see at first hand what the red states think of them. The ambivalence made the room vibrate with a queasy intensity.

“I’m mostly here to see a freak show,” conceded Amy Slonaker, a 34-year-old lawyer and record collector. “But it also does actually dovetail with some of my intellectual interests,” she said, interlocking her fingers together to illustrate the connection. Ms. Slonaker grew up in an Evangelical Christian family in Santa Barbara, Calif., and studied religion in college. “I decided that it was all bullshit in junior high school,” Ms. Slonaker continued, “but I just kind of kept quiet and didn’t rock the boat until I could finally escape.”

Later, a clearly shaken Charles Mee, the playwright, stopped for a moment to reflect on what he had just seen. “First of all,” he began, “it’s amazing …. The very thought that this is a play that thousands of people see and take seriously is almost unbelievable. You don’t believe the text unless you already believe the context. It just seems stupid and preposterous and not funny—just appallingly unbelievable and unpersuasive.”

In one scene, a doctor wearing a yarmulke withholds treatment from a once-catatonic woman whose feeding tube has just been ripped from her throat. The woman has sprung back to life, but the doctor is unmoved.

“And so then you have to think as a left-winger,” Mr. Mee continued. “Is all of our left-wing theater equally unpersuasive unless you already believe, unless it’s confirming your prejudice? Is it really funny for somebody in the theater to just say the words ‘George W. Bush’?”

Brian Dooda, a 29-year-old theater archivist who lives in Greenpoint, was more blithe. “I’m definitely here to laugh,” he said. “But listen, I think this is probably something that even the evangelical kids laugh at.”

Irony is not, by its nature, a thing that can die; to declare the death of irony is to make yourself its fool. But something can happen to irony when you lose a stable point of reference from which to distinguish, say, an anti-gay screed from high camp, or anti-pornography crusading from pornography itself, or Christian proselytizing from the darkest blasphemy.

Later on in Hell House, we see a high-school cheerleader laid out on a stretcher in her uniform, complete with pom-poms. She is drenched in blood. There is blood splattered on the wall and on the scrubs of the doctor, who smokes a cigarette as he cues up the vacuum cleaner. We move into a red womb and see large aluminum forceps extract a girl dressed as a fetus from the birth canal.

Finally, we are taken on a guided tour of Hell. Wailing, lamentations, shrieks. A man grabs me by the arm. “He told me I was born gay, and I believed them!” he shouts. “Allah told me to blow up the subway!” screams a man with an Indian accent. “He said that was what I should do, and I believed him. But I was wrong, so wrong!” A man in a tuxedo lisps out a flamboyant show tune: He’s on his way to his wedding. He’s in Hell, but why isn’t he suffering? We laugh and laugh—we can’t help but laugh.

Then we found ourselves in a room filled with light arrayed with white curtains. A bearded man in a white robe appears wearing a beatific expression. It’s an actor pretending to be an actor pretending to be Jesus. His amateurish delivery is a sign of his very professionalism. But after all the din and all the chortling we had done, the words he spoke cast a sudden hush around the room—and even in the presence of all these unbelievers, you felt something move in you to be with these other people and hear kindly words and fair promises declaimed. It was perhaps the most insidious moment of all.

“If you believe with your whole heart that I was raised from the dead, and you confess with your mouth that I am the Lord,” the actor pretending to be an actor pretending to be Jesus assured us, “you will be saved. And your name will be written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, and every single person whose name is in that book will spend eternity with me in Heaven.”

The rangy, bespectacled Mr. Greif's cheeks flushed crimson as he launched into "The Meaning of Life, (Part 1)," his contribution to the second issue of n+1. n+1 is the tiny, self-financed biannual literary and political journal that Mr. Greif launched with Benjamin Kunkel, Marco Roth and Keith Gessen this summer, whose ambitions include-but are not limited to-"the revitalization of civilization."

The four editors-each, in Beatles-esque fashion, epitomizing a distinct type (the jock, the dreamer, the heartthrob, the "effete intellectual")-continue to exude, on the cusp of their 30's, the dewy self-possession that attends a lifetime of precocity. n+1 proposes to "revive progress" by looking back to the highbrow taste-mongering and radical politics of the New York intellectuals: Dwight Macdonald, Clement Greenberg, Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, Irving Howe and Hannah Arendt. n+1's attempt to restore the life of the independent intellectual begins, oddly enough, with raising the self-esteem of this beleaguered clan, one often heard bemoaning its marginalization. The boys have made, among themselves, "the n+1 laugh" a name for the "kind of laughter-deep laughter-that can overthrow kingdoms," said Mr. Gessen. "Which mostly occurs toward things written in n+1 itself." There is clearly a sense in which they are a Socratic gathering of mutually admiring men (whose fights are sometimes resolved by 23-year-old managing editor Allison Lorentzen) giving each other courage for a brave adventure-a kind of highbrow Fight Club.

"We're not posing as New York intellectuals," Marco Roth, 30, told me earlier. A graduate of Dalton and Columbia, now a doctoral candidate in comp lit at Yale, Mr. Roth is a self-described "effete intellectual" whose Parisian-inflected French apparently astonished Jacques Derrida, as he reported in an essay commemorating the recently deceased thinker at nplusonemag.com (the Web site, to which I have contributed, where they post a grab bag of commentary, e-mail and, according to a short-lived policy promulgated on the site itself, "only that which sucks"). Mr. Roth's English wife, Emily Wilson (a professor of classics at the University of Pennsylvania, and A.N. Wilson's daughter) was at the reading with their newborn daughter in tow. "[The New York intellectuals] are a kind of aspiration-a hope," said Mr. Roth.

The reading, for a crowd of 60 friends and supporters (including the historian and critic Caleb Crain, Newsday assistant books editor Peter Terzian, Vanessa Mobley of Henry Holt and New Yorker –anointed fiction phenom Nell Freudenberger), turned out to be endearingly flustered, punctuated by nervous little asides-a sharp contrast to the swaggering tone of the magazine's inaugural issue, which featured attacks on … the entire intellectual situation. (The name n+1 is an algebraic notation for an advancing series.) At St. Mark's Bookshop, n+1 has sold 70 copies, making it the biggest-selling venue for the magazine's tiny first print run. "For a new journal, that's very impressive," said store manager Michael Russo. Slowly, others have taken notice. Pankaj Mishra, author of An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World and a frequent New York Review of Books contributor, browsing n+1 on the newsstands, "was struck by its fresh, honest and extremely intelligent stance," and signed on as a contributor.

Upstart journals are often showcases for newcomers starting their careers; n+1 is an eccentric detour for writers already launched on them. Mr. Gessen, 29, with his big, toothy grin, wild eyes and mop of dark hair, fled Soviet anti-Semitism with his family in 1981, at the age of 6. He has written for The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic Monthly, and recently signed on to write regularly about books for New York magazine, in which he has called The New York Times a paper "owned by proper German Jews, and written by Philistines," and pronounced "the end of the twee literary sensibility-that of Dave Eggers and company." Mr. Gessen opened the reading by talking extempore about the inspiration behind n+1, citing Dissent, The Partisan Review, some avant-garde Russian journals, but also-something much more telling-four defunct magazines of the 1990's.

Feed, Suck, Hermenaut and Lingua Franca pioneered a deft, swift, funny way of writing about ideas-one that was mordant about and skeptical of the pieties of the Baby Boomers, big media and academia. In the mid-1990's, these alternative voices were reaching critical mass, and New York seemed to bloom with possibility for enterprising young intellectuals. The irony is that these journals were among the first casualties of the economic meltdown that proved their skepticism right. Taken together, their failures begin to look like the verdict of the market on young intellectuals. Though they launched many writers and editors high onto the mastheads of a half-dozen leading publications, a special way of writing and thinking lost a home. The young live and work in conditions-of extortionate rents, ruinous competition and pervasive nepotism-more conducive to turning out those familiar young New York characters: résumé polishers, internship seekers, beleaguered staffers, reluctant lawyers, toilers in think tanks, foundations, academic theory mills.

And every few years, writers have wrung their hands over or blithely reaffirmed the death of the independent intellectual in books or major articles, with the present compared unfavorably to the 1950's "Age of Criticism." It was in the pages of the Partisan Review and its spinoffs that the New York intellectuals showed the "powerless power" that little magazines could wield.

They wrote some of the most important essays of the century, and shaped the politics and tastes of generations of writers and critics-all without exceeding a circulation of 15,000. But before they became grave pontificators on the Responsibility of Intellectuals, Partisan Review co-founder William Phillips reminds us, the New York intellectuals were "cocky kids, driven by a grandiose idea of launching a new literary movement, combining older with younger talents, and the best of the new radicalism with the innovative energy of modernism." n+1 has the cockiness. By proposing to fill it, the magazine exposes a vacuum in our public life.

n+1 uses two institutions- McSweeney's and The Believer on the one hand, and the culture section of The New Republic on the other-as surrogates for "the age of demented self-censorship" it proposes to smash open. (It also puts the hatchet to The Weekly Standard.) It calls The New Republic's culture section "the best literary section in the country" before denouncing its "wholly negative" method as a "fake refinement that turns into a vulgarity baser than any other." "It's a very damaging mistake," the piece avers: "the idea that sniffing out the tasteless is the same thing as taste."

" The New Republic seems to want to find ways to catch people out saying things beyond the pale, so they might never have to be thought of again," said Benjamin Kunkel, the pensive, fine-mannered, golden-haired n+1 editor who just delivered his first completed novel, titled Indecision-about a prep-school boy footloose in Ecuador while taking a space-age drug to combat his terminal case of indecision. (The novel was sold to Random House "for a big pile of money," Mr. Gessen informs me.) Despite the company he keeps, he is, Mr. Gessen says, "pure goy," a graduate of St. Paul's School in New Hampshire.

Lee Siegel, one of the New Republic critics targeted for criticism, responded with a brief rejoinder. "I sympathize with their aspirations for the culture," he said, "but I wish that the quality of their work was on the level of their ambition."

n+1's attack on McSweeney's and The Believer proceeds by taking Mr. Eggers and his movement seriously. (The mags did not return requests for comment.) The journal admires the way Mr. Eggers used the existing media to build an alternative one and a literary community around it.

"The form of what Eggers has done is exemplary. It shows us certain possibilities," said Mr. Greif, who is also a senior correspondent for The American Prospect.

But content-wise, the piece argues, "the innovation of the Eggersards was their creation of a regressive avant-garde": a veneration of childhood and innocence that mirrors the sentimental popular culture, as well as an emphasis on gags that are "absurdist in the degraded sense, that is, pointless."

"There may be some of the narcissism of minor differences at work here," conceded Mr. Crain at the reading, noting that The Believer and n+1 share certain important virtues-namely, detachment from the "tyranny of the publicity and news cycles."

The Believer would likely assent to n+1's attacks on The New Republic, and vice versa. But n+1 argues that both Mr. Eggers and The New Republic would rather shut people up than engage in an honest, public contest of ideas. At the reading, Mr. Gessen said he wanted to create a magazine that would allow people to use their intelligence to the fullest to tackle challenging and risky subjects. "It used to be, in the 1950's, that you'd write for, say, Fortune magazine for money and the Partisan Review for love. We need a new outlet that can be the magazine that lets you say what you really want to say."

n+1 wants to say a number of things that its editors believe responsible liberal opinion won't permit.

"Try saying that the act we call 'war' would more properly be termed a massacre," the opening editorial statement suggests, "and that the state we call 'occupation' would more properly be termed a war; that the conspiracy theories, here and abroad, which have not yet been proved true by Seymour Hersh or the General Accounting Office are probably, nonetheless, true and see how far you get." In "Paranoiastan," Masha Gessen (Keith's big sister and the former U.S. News and World Report bureau chief) endorses the theory that the Russian security service F.S.B. blew up an apartment building a few years back and blamed it on the Chechens. "Mogadishu, Baghdad, Troy" uses the original Western war epic, the Iliad, to explain the nature of contemporary U.S. warfare and, by extension, our failures in Iraq. "Against Exercise" assails the sweaty public rat cages known as gyms. "Palestine, the 51st State," a modest proposal for extending American statehood to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, is an example of the "political surrealism" that Mr. Greif hopes will awaken "a numbed and straitjacketed conventional wisdom."

"We say the thing that seems like craziness, but goes for the underlying principles most commentators can't loosen their ties to remember. When I watch the network news, I think: "Who's insane, them or me?" he said. Mr. Greif, at the age of 17, discovered the "excremental philosophy" of Georges Bataille at Boston's Commonwealth School and realized that the "thing I most wanted to be when I grew up … was a French intellectual." (He ended up pursuing this goal at Harvard, Oxford and Yale, where he's currently a doctoral candidate in American studies.) He continued: "Until the day he's asked to draft some legislation, a dreamer had better be reckless."

This "recklessness" has, unsurprisingly, been received with praise and criticism. The New York Times Book Review and Salon critic Laura Miller, a supporter of the magazine, voiced a common skepticism about the bid to reclaim the legacy of the Partisan Review crowd: "I don't really see the point of determining that you're going try to be a reincarnation of some previous cultural moment. I don't lend much credence to people who obsess about Paris in the 20's, or to the idea that if we could just get to the right place with the right sort of people, everything would be epochal and romantic."

Paul Berman, attacked in an editorial statement lamenting that "some of the best people in our intellectual class … gave their 'critical support' to a hubristic, suicidal adventure in Iraq," was a good sport. "In my view, n+1 has the right spirit," he wrote via e-mail. "The editors have their opinions, which I agree with X% of the time, and not X+1. But they are dedicated to their own liveliness more than to any particular opinion, and this is the important thing-to be alive to the moment. They don't seem to need a cane to get up from their easy chairs. They want to escape the provincialism of American intellectual life, on which I agree with them X squared %. All in all, their magazine had better be pretty good-if not, our future is screwed."

But the suspicion is that n+1's freedom to aspire to lofty things is merely the prerogative of privilege-notably, gender privilege. The founding editors are all male, and out of 20 articles in the first issue, 19 were written by men.

"These guys should know from their studies at Yale that, as Harold Bloom said, every generation of young men comes along and kills the father and says they are going to start a revolution and say the things no one has ever said before," said Elizabeth Merrick, the co-founder of the Cupcake Reading Series. Ms. Merrick was recently named New York's "Best Feminist Literary Whistle-Blower" by The Village Voice for criticizing the established journals of opinion- The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Review of Books-for their 80 to 90 percent male (she counts them up) cast of writers. Ms. Merrick admires n+1's writing, but "the real revolution would've been to have half women and half men. Another elite boys' club-we have enough of those already."

"How can they possibly call us chest-thumping Neanderthals?" mused Mr. Gessen. "I mean-have they looked at Marco?" Mr. Roth's feline features and wild Jew-fro make for the kind of profile you picture caricatured on a Barnes and Noble bag: the languid eyes, the pallor, the graceful arabesques of a cigarette-bearing hand, the suggestion of innumerable allergies, the diminutive man's proud hauteur. For Mr. Gessen, the "male-centric" problem will be solved with the next issue, which is slated to have at least three new female contributions, including "a magnificent 20,000-word essay from a six-foot-tall Turkish woman," Elif Batuman, about Isaac Babel.

Mr. Roth concedes "there is probably an intensity to our bonding-and our fights-that being all male has helped." He continues: "The women in our lives are successful professionals. Their attitude toward this project has been one of justified condescension. Now the magazine exists, and we'll see what happens next."

It's too early to tell if n+1 can realistically expect to close the yawning gap between its improvisatory origins and its historical ambitions, or yoke together its founders' highbrow tastes and far-left-of-center politics in a coherent way, or build (as they claim to want to) a movement of young intellectuals. Or, for that matter, if the return of the New York intellectual style-with its egotistical polemical tone and taste for the grand generalization-is really what the world wants, or needs. Despite this, n+1 is ready to take its swing.

"I kept waiting for someone to take me aside and say, 'Write what is highest and best in you to write,'" said Mr. Greif. "In retrospect, it was an absurd thing to believe. I slowly came to the realization that if I wanted the freedom to say all that I wanted to say, I would have to do it myself."

1968: The Year That Rocked the World , by Mark Kurlansky. Ballantine Books, 464 pages, $26.95.

You can still find a handful of people (many of them now tenured) who will summon a nostalgic pang for the wild slogans spray-painted around Paris during the May 1968 student uprising. Overheated, purple paradoxes like "Be realistic-demand the impossible" or "All Power to the Imagination" seemed just audacious enough to usher in the millennium if declaimed with sufficient idealistic fervor. All that fateful year, kids were surging into the streets of Prague, Warsaw, Berlin, Mexico City, Berkeley and New York. The old Cold War liberalism-anti-communist, incrementalist and shackled to the timid definition of politics as the "art of the possible"-seemed about to topple, displaced by a spontaneous youthful rebellion. The youths proposed to abolish war, racism, colonialism, injustice, sexual repression, authoritarian work relations and the discontents of affluence-without casting a single vote, or firing a single shot.

By the year's end, these grand hopes were in ruin, pummeled into submission by riot police (or police riots) in Chicago and Morningside Heights, outfoxed by a geriatric but still swift Générale de Gaulle in Paris, shot to pieces in Mexico City and crushed under the treads of Soviet tanks in Prague. All that political purism delivered a Nixon Presidency, energized a global conservative reaction and blew out what remained of its strength in a welter of mindless anti-Americanism, terrorism and lunatic schemes for violent revolution only partially redeemed by their ineptitude. (The bomb-making Weathermen wound up blowing up no one but themselves in a West Village townhouse.) And yet, as Mark Kurlansky puts it in the concluding chapter of his clumsy attempt at generational hagiography, 1968 remains a year "that was valued and is missed."

There are two sensible ways to explain this. For one, conflict is exciting, and makes everyday life seem drab in comparison. More substantively, the insurgent spirit of the times changed the world, particularly in the realm of middle-class manners and mores. On the eve of a student takeover of Columbia University, a Barnard student's illicit off-campus co-habitation with her boyfriend made the cover of The New York Times for several weeks running. It's a measure of the successful revolution that it renders the overthrown standards literally unthinkable, and this was an honest-to-goodness revolution. As it was with unmarried co-habitation, so it came to be with gay rights, women in the workplace, no-fault divorce, youth culture, a pervasive mood of anti-authoritarianism and the institutionalization of certain ethnic grievances in universities. All of these now-familiar fixtures emerged from the crucible of the 60's. (Plus, as socialist writer and activist Michael Harrington pointed out, "Everybody was getting laid.")

Culture warriors continue to heap praise and blame-both deserved-on the 60's and its consequences. At its best, the movement punctured complacency, shook up tired formulas and tried to give political expression to concerns about the fate of the soul in a managerial society-all good things. But Mr. Kurlansky, best-selling author of Salt: A World History and Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World , wants to make a larger claim, which neither his writing nor the historical record can sustain.

Here's how he puts it: "The thrilling thing about the year 1968 was that it was a time when significant segments of the population all over the globe refused to be silent about the many things that are wrong with the world …. And this gave the world a sense of hope that it has rarely had, a sense that where there is wrong, there are always people who will expose it and try to change it."

There was a great moral drama at the heart of the movements of 1968, rooted in the continuing civil-rights struggle and in resistance to a war in Vietnam that was both a crime and a blunder. (It's a blunder for a democracy to commit crimes, and a crime for so powerful a state to blunder with American, and other, lives.) But the conflict was not a simple morality play, and by casting it as such, Mr. Kurlansky confuses his own emotions with historical judgment.

Most of 1968: The Year That Rocked the World is a fast if not quite deft gloss, a recap of the astonishing crush of events. Mr. Kurlansky is fond of television and gives it deserved credit for spreading the mood of revolt, but insufficient blame for exaggerating the outrageous, nose-thumbing antics of the youth culture at the expense of its moral vision. The book often resembles a text-bound version of those innumerable grainy, green-toned montages familiar from a dozen television documentaries-images of miniskirts, Ho Chi Minh, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Abbie Hoffman, the Living Theatre, a dying Robert Kennedy and Dr. Benjamin Spock rush by in a blur, with "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" as the soundtrack. He hopscotches from the first stirrings of the attempted Czechoslovakian reforms known as the Prague Spring to the civil-rights movement, to the emergence of Polish dissident Adam Michnik, to the West German controversies over a too-partial de-Nazification. He cites the famous letter from S.D.S. organizer and Weatherman Mark Rudd to Columbia University president Grayson Kirk, which ended with a quotation from LeRoi Jones: "Up against the Wall, Motherfucker, this is a stick-up." In one perplexing passage, Mr. Kurlansky claims that the Port Huron Statement's anti-anti-communism "first started to be expressed in the 1950's with the film characters portrayed by James Dean, Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley."

The book's signal weakness is its (deliberate, one suspects) failure to discriminate between what Paul Berman has identified as the two completely different political revolutions of 1968. One sought to impose European totalitarianism in the Third World under the banner of "national liberation." The other was a revolt against European totalitarianism in the Eastern bloc. Though the groovy, swirling currents of the time made them seem like a common project, the two revolutions were necessarily opposed to one another.

By 1968, a radical critique of American intrusion into places it didn't belong had turned into the chant of "Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh, the N.L.F. is gonna win," and a romantic infatuation with Third World revolutionaries-Che, Castro, Mao, Ho and, unbelievably, Kim Il Sung. The irony was not lost on many observers at the time: The Czech students were fighting for the very rights-free speech and genuine representation-that American and West European students both took for granted and disdained as inadequate to a vaguely defined "participatory democracy" that had, by 1968, increasingly merged with an open embrace of Chinese- or Soviet-style dictatorship. An America swamped in a sea of its enemies became the fond hope of too many highly placed American and European radicals. Rather than parse out these nuances, Mr. Kurlansky recycles the lame rhetoric of moral equivalence, noting that the Czech protesters "were being watched by secret police, but so were American and European student demonstrators." This is simply hopeless, an equation too silly to require debunking.

Because he fails to discriminate between the two strands of revolutionary fervor, Mr. Kurlansky runs into difficulties when he attempts to trace a direct line of descent from the movements of 1968 to the successful nonviolent revolutions that swept away Soviet communism in 1989. It was the revolution against totalitarianism that was redeemed in 1989, and not the Third World adventurism of 1968-era S.D.S. One of the heroes of many Eastern Bloc dissidents turned out to be (of all people) that bugbear of conservative reaction, Ronald Reagan, who said this of the student protesters in California while he was governor in 1970: "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement." The Eastern Bloc dissidents were perhaps deluded in their choice of heroes, but their admiration for President Reagan underscores the point that the story isn't as simple as Mr. Kurlansky would like it to be.

Mr. Kurlansky's account of the Presidential election of 1968 is also hobbled by his biases. Nixon's winning "Southern strategy" was indeed based on pandering to Southern whites with thinly veiled racist appeals to "law and order." Mr. Kurlansky puts it like this: "Republicans get the racist vote and the Democrats get the black vote, and it turns out in America there are more racist voters than black voters." Alas, that was only half of Nixon's strategy; the other half was to mobilize the Northern working class against the would-be revolutionary vanguard. (National Liberation Front flags-never in the majority at the anti-war rallies, but increasingly visible by 1968-only furthered Nixon's cause.)

When the Black Panthers embraced a program of armed resistance after the death of Martin Luther King, they quickly got themselves shot or locked up in a half-dozen cities, demonstrating what ought to have been the obvious practical disadvantage of declaring war on a state which has many more guns than you have. The radical chic of violence and anti-Americanism (Susan Sontag writing that the "white race is the cancer of human history," the New York Review of Books printing the recipe for Molotov cocktails on its front cover and so forth) took in a numerically tiny minority of the movement, but elites-by definition-have a disproportionate influence, controlling institutional structures and articulating symbols. In tune with the anti-elitist rhetoric of the time, movement leaders pretended not to be leaders; many wound up exercising power without responsibility and discredited the actions of millions. As Joseph Epstein put it in the early 1970's, Park Avenue radicalism promised to render America a "vast desert populated by the bored rich and the nihilistic young."

Tactical, strategic and, indeed, moral blunders go a long way toward explaining the seeming paradox, unmentioned by Mr. Kurlansky (who keeps mistaking himself and his peers for "everyone"), that as the war in Vietnam grew more unpopular, so did the anti-war movement. As former S.D.S. leader Todd Gitlin has pointed out, the largest left-wing movement in American history was not crushed by repression alone: The movement leadership actively collaborated in its own destruction.

Some readers of 1968 will cheer themselves hoarse as Mr. Kurlansky defends the undeniably brave exploits of the movement's principle actors. But the cheering enthusiasts need their boomer self-satisfaction challenged rather than indulged. The book is full to the brim with tragedy-the senseless bloodletting in Vietnam, the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. But there's another tragic story, an ambiguous and ironic story, that's not told here: It's about the premature death of a good and worthy dream, smothered in a morass of the dreamers' own making.

Wesley Yang has reviewed books for Salon, the Washington City Paper and the San Francisco Chronicle .

It is often said that television came into its own as a political medium during the 1960 debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. We now know that the old story is misleading in several ways. Kennedy's aura of youthful, radiant health was an illusion sustained by a secret regimen of pills and shots. The decisive edge in the election-one of the closest in American history-came not from Kennedy's poised patrician grace, but from the backroom chicanery of his father's political associates. Furthermore, as Thomas Doherty reminds us in Cold War, Cool Medium, his engaging survey of the conjunction of television and McCarthyism, television had already emerged as "the grand cathedral for the secular ritual of American democracy" six years earlier, when a glowering, sputtering junior Senator from Wisconsin undid himself and the doctrine that bears his name before an audience of 20 million.

Senator Joe McCarthy's legend looms so large that he's credited with things he never actually did, like investigating Hollywood (that was the House Committee on Un-American Activities), collaring a Communist spy (he never caught a single one) or initiating a "loyalty" program that expelled thousands of loosely defined "loyalty risks" from government (that was President Harry Truman, and the purge was mostly complete before 1950). The major successes of domestic anti-Communism-the spies caught, the Communist Party eviscerated-belong to others. But no one before or since has made quite the same all-pervading stink as McCarthy.

Lacking any positive vision of American life, he battened on the sectional, social and class fault lines that divided Americans, catalyzing them into a single fanatic crusade. In McCarthy's updated demonology, an Eastern, internationalist, Anglophile, Ivy League–educated diplomat was as good as red, and probably pink in the trousers to boot. His fantasies cast liberals as "dupes" at best-at worst, as the willing agents of a Communist conspiracy poised to take over the world. His gift for publicity affixed his name to a tendency that preceded and outlasted him by decades.

Mr. Doherty's wide-ranging, impressionistic portrait of the era climaxes at the fateful moment when television-battered by the blacklist, easily cowed by sponsor pressure or public protest of any kind-stopped appeasing McCarthy and struck back, hard. Though he'd said many preposterous things by February 1954 and been exposed repeatedly by the print media (his most infamous charge called General George Marshall, architect of the plan to stem the Soviet advance in Western Europe through economic aid, a Soviet agent at the center of "a conspiracy so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man"), his public-approval rating remained high. But on March 9, 1954, Edward R. Murrow began the counterattack. That evening's episode of his documentary news program See It Now was a montage of clips exposing the Senator's snarling, bullying excesses, followed by a short statement condemning McCarthyism in measured but firm language. It was the first explicit act of defiance by television, and it quickly proved decisive.

Two days later, the Eisenhower administration stopped appeasing McCarthy and joined the fight. The ensuing Army-McCarthy hearings, staged to air out charges that McCarthy's controversial young lawyer Roy M. Cohn had sought preferential treatment for a draftee private (his colleague and very close confidant, G. David Schine), provided the scaffold from which McCarthy happily hung himself. The public watched him up close for the 36 days of the hearing, and recoiled. Shortly afterward came Senatorial condemnation and his effective neutralization as a force in American politics.

Mr. Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University and a noted film historian, deftly recaps this familiar story. Not surprisingly, some of the book's strongest material is contained in his close readings of the fraught cultural subtexts surrounding the anti-Communist hysteria. He sifts through material as familiar as I Love Lucy and Liberace's unwavering fidelity to mother and bachelorhood, along with less-well-remembered dustups over the ethnic sitcom The Goldbergs and the syndicated anti-Communist spook series I Led Three Lives, to illustrate the racial and psychosexual dynamite smuggled into many popular entertainments. He explains how the blacklist worked and concludes that it amounted to a "classic protection racket," enriching the self-appointed adventurers that vetted loyalty risks, and revisits the now-forgotten televisual triumphs of Eisenhower and Nixon. Hewing to a kind of muscular centrism, he sympathetically details the travails of an actor hounded into suicide by a loyalty committee run amok, but also (again, familiarly) scolds Lillian Hellman for harping on the sufferings of McCarthy's victims while implicitly excusing the far greater abuses of the Soviet gulag. In the name of free expression, he denounces both McCarthyism and the proto–political correctness of the NAACP's boycott of Amos 'n' Andy, which he calls McCarthyism's "mirror image."

Mr. Doherty makes more of television's eventual turn against McCarthy than he should. Conventional wisdom, he tells us, casts television "as a co-conspirator in the conformities and repressions of Cold War America." In fact, he argues, "During the Cold War, through television, America became a more open and tolerant place." There's some truth to this: Variety shows like Ed Sullivan's showed remarkable courage by showcasing black and white talent together. But television's influence in the 50's is hard to gauge, and its legacy is too mixed to justify Mr. Doherty's warm embrace. He also shows that television was slavish in its deference to McCarthyism for the first three years, and even the heroic confrontation established troubling precedents.

Just as the liberal establishment "contained" McCarthyism by stiffening its own militant anti-Communism, inciting a generation of Ivy League tough guys to prove in the jungles of Vietnam how "hard" they were on Communism, so television beat McCarthyism by adopting some of the Senator's favorite smear tactics. ("There is a quality in the man," Leslie Fielder once wrote, "that makes McCarthys of us all.") Murrow used out-of-context clips that distorted the issues to convict an opponent on purely visceral, emotional grounds. The attack burnished the myth of the "liberal" media, but it really demonstrated a new kind of specifically televisual power. The Army-McCarthy hearings made McCarthy look like something worse than a scoundrel-they made him look like a loser. As anyone who has sat through Cokie Roberts' smug dismissals of all substance and principle can attest, the "cool medium" can cut tyrants down to size-while enabling a tyranny of its own.

While the cool-medium thesis that Mr. Doherty imports from Marshall McLuhan to explain McCarthy's inevitable failure on television seems plausible at first, objections soon spring to mind. The hot and scabrous style of the Irish brawler has made a comeback on the allegedly cool medium. By assaulting the cautious pieties of institutional liberalism, Fox News has grabbed the ratings, the dollars and the aura of brash insurgency that millions of Americans today mistake for-yes-"cool." The inexcusable Ann Coulter has scored a best-seller by glorying in McCarthyism; she's revived the sentiments expressed in the McCarthy-era hymn "Nobody Loves Joe But the Pee-pul."

Though scuppered by his own audacity, McCarthy nonetheless helped to shift the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus sharply rightward for a generation. Today, his open admirers and unacknowledged epigones conduct a war on dissent whose methods he would have recognized. Call it McCarthy's revenge on the fancy-pants, the liberals, the professors-and the cool medium of television, which built him up, knocked him down and may yet serve his ends.

Wesley Yang has reviewed books for Salon, the Washington City Paper and the San Francisco Chronicle.