Knightley in Anna Karenina. (Laurie Sparham)

It’s once more around the block for Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy’s sweeping, complex saga about an adulterous heroine who loved too much and too well, ruining her reputation and wrecking her marriage while men winked and women wept (yes, they loved soap operas even on the Russian steppes). The story of Anna, the beautiful, unhappily married and doomed aristocrat who spins a tangled web of deceit and betrayal so tragic that it eventually drives her into the path of an oncoming train, has been filmed at least a dozen times, most memorably with Greta Garbo and Vivien Leigh. Keira Knightley is hardly in the same league with those icons, but she makes a decorative centerpiece in this troubled remake by her mentor, director Joe Wright, who guided her in two previous films, Pride and Prejudice and Atonement. She’s not quite up to the material this time. Her eyes are less cloudy and more like candles on a cake, but behind the reflection of their glow, there’s nobody home when the lights go out.

Joe Wright’s ornate visuals are easy on the eye, but the wooden, mannered screenplay by verbose playwright Tom Stoppard is jarringly at odds with the neo-realism Tolstoy was aiming for in his novel, a sensation from the day it was published in 1877. His tortured themes of passion, addiction and suicide are now upstaged by lavish sets, costume changes and chandeliers that would be more at home in The Forsyte Saga. Even worse, the stylistic conceit of the Wright-Stoppard team is to set the sprawling action of the entire movie on the proscenium stage of an elegant theater, robbing it of all spontaneity and sense of discovery. This audacious sense of artificial staging and calculated theatricality is intriguing for about 10 minutes—what better metaphor for a decadent and disintegrating society than a theater?—but when the plot moves from St. Petersburg to Moscow, or from lush dinner parties to railroad cars running on miniature tracks and Russian wheat fields, you realize that a stage-bound production could never work, and wonder why they ever bothered in the first place. Unfortunately, the high-concept approach more closely resembles one of those phony, hysterical, over-produced bores by Baz Luhrmann than anything by Tolstoy. Who, in his right mind, would set out to imitate Baz Luhrmann?

You probably know all you need to know about the plot. In 1874 Imperialist Russia, Anna, the virtuous but flighty wife of dull, pinch-faced bureaucrat Alexei Karenin (surprisingly well played against type by Jude Law) has been a devoted wife and mother for nine years. Weary of the pretense of keeping up appearances in a stagnant marriage, she clings to the notion of romantic love as the final illusion of Old Russia, disgracing her family and risking her wealth, security and respectability to throw herself into a reckless affair with Count Vronsky, a dashing but shallow cavalry officer (baby-faced Aaron Taylor-Johnson). The infatuation seems foolish from the start, but he awakens her long-suppressed sexuality in ways that persuade an otherwise responsible woman to break her marriage vows and sacrifice her propriety, her values and her morals to become the mistress of a foppish, prissy-mouthed dandy, going so far as to give birth to his baby. The price she pays is very high indeed.

The cast is good (especially Mr. Law) and there’s plenty to look at, from lavish balls to windmills in the snow. But it’s a blank and tedious film, like a golf ball displayed in the Hermitage museum in the jeweled box of a Fabergé egg. For all of its palaver about love, it’s strangely reluctant to show much of a pulse. Instead of walls, windows, curtains and the Russian people, you get painted flats and dress extras. When Anna moves into a clinch, the stage lights dim behind her and footlights brighten her profile, exaggerating every emotion. The movie seems even less palatable when it ditches the original intentions of Tolstoy himself. He was a spiritual anarchist, the son of land-owning nobility, who eventually denounced his privileged background and became a Christian moralist. His harsh view of Anna was a deliberate offshoot of his ascetic views. He hated the artifice of 19th-century Russian society, believed in marriage and family (he fathered 13 children) and rejected all material wealth, including his own earnings and copyrights. He preferred the sweat of hard labor in the fields of his country estate to the peccadillos of high society. I give credit to Tom Stoppard for contrasting the fate of Anna, trapped by the superficiality of the upper classes, with the parallel story of a farmer named Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) who seeks a purer life in rural scenes where he toils in the fields, shoulder to shoulder with his serfs.

Classic literary giants as diverse as Faulkner, Proust, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Mann and Woolf have all openly declared Tolstoy a genius. James Joyce once wrote that he was “never dull, never stupid, never tired, pedantic or theatrical.” He might change his mind if he saw Anna Karenina.

ANNA KARENINA

Running Time 130 minutes

Written by Tom Stoppard
(screenplay) and Leo Tolstoy (novel)

Directed by Joe Wright

Starring Keira Knightley, Jude Law
and Aaron Taylor-Johnson

2/4

rreed@observer.com

Jennifer Garner in 'Butter'

The Master

Paul Thomas Anderson

Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams

September 14

This long-deferred movie actually couldn’t have been better timed. An apparent allegory for the creation of Scientology, The Master comes along just as public interest in the (alleged!) money-grubbing cult is at an all-time high, post-Tom/Katie divorce. In this telling, Philip Seymour Hoffman is the L. Ron Hubbard-like figure who snares untold numbers of believers into his thrall. Plot details, per Paul Thomas Anderson’s standard, are hazy, but the trailer reveals simply that Mr. Anderson has kept up his keen attention to aesthetic compostion--and that Amy Adams, playing a devoted cult wife, may be this film’s MVP. Can we arrange for Katie Holmes to present her the Oscar?

Killing Them Softly

Andrew Dominik

Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini, Sam Rockwell

September 21

Andrew Dominik’s follow-up to the much-loved, little-seen Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford jumps forward in time--it’s a modern-day store of mobland America, based on a pulp crime novel. The movie was a hit at Cannes, and may be yet another feather in the cap of good-looking weirdo character actor Brad Pitt, who plays a hitman’s assistant, or “point man.” The whole thing promises to be a real boys’ club, with costars like Richard Jenkins, James Gandolfini, and Ray Liotta, who knows a thing or two (actually, just one thing) about mob movies.

Butter

Jim Field Smith

Yara Shahidi, Jennifer Garner, Ty Burrell

October 5

Little is really known about this long-delayed satirical film. How long-delayed was it, you ask? The early buzz was that Jennifer Garner’s character, a housewife and competitive butter-sculptor, was based on Presidential front-runner Michele Bachmann. Director Jim Field Smith hails from the U.K. but takes on heartland rituals in this look at the dairy-art circuit, whose protagonist is an adopted orphan daring to take on the longtime champions (Ms. Garner and Mr. Burrell). Somehow, Hugh Jackman, Olivia Wilde, and Alicia Silverstone fit into this puzzle--no word on what Ms. Silverstone, noted vegan, did around the enormous blocks of milk product.

Argo

Ben Affleck

Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin

October 12

Ben Affleck, flamed-out Hollywood star, has had a successful second career as the director of Boston heist pictures, but his third directorial effort, Argo, finally takes him outside of the old neigborhood. Mr. Affleck stars as a CIA officer who comes up with a cunning plan to rescue escapees during the Iran hostage crisis--he fakes the production of a sci-fi movie (Iran makes a lovely moonscape, after all) and attempts to airlift out the Americans, pretending they’re crew members. Sounds fairly tidy, but we’re sure complications will ensue--and we haven’t even read the Wired article on which the whole thing’s based!

Cloud Atlas

Tom Twkyer, Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski

Tom Hanks, Hugo Weaving, Halle Berry

October 26

Everyone believed that the mammoth David Mitchell novel, encompassing millennia of human experience, was unfilmable. And maybe everyone was right! All we know right now is that the Wachowskis (of the Matrix films) and Tom Twkyer (of Run Lola Run) have turned all of their creative over-enthusiasm towards putting together the most rollicking movie ever to contain both a Martin Amis-style comedy of manners and a post-apocalyptic agrarian community on Hawaii. Somehow, major stars like Tom Hanks and Halle Berry fit into the equation. As you read this description, you’re already significantly behind; you’d better start reading Cloud Atlas this minute if you hope to have it finished and marginally comprehended by October!

Keira Knightley in 'Anna Karenina'

Skyfall

Sam Mendes

Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes

November 9

The next, and long-delayed, installment in the James Bond story comes with a schmancy pedigree--director Sam Mendes has experienced diminishing returns since the 1990s, but he still, you know, has an Oscar. So too does Javier Bardem, who promises to be the most menacing villain since Dr. No. Un-bedecked by golden trophies are new Bond girls Naomie Harris and Bérénice Marlohe, but that’s hardly the point, is it? About the plot, little is known, but for the promise of spy-queen M’s past coming back to haunt her. All the better: it’s about time Judi Dench got to stretch her acting muscles in the Bond movies.

Anna Karenina

Joe Wright

Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson

November 9

Joe Wright just can’t resist the charms of Keira Knightley--and he’s hardly alone! Mr. Wright made it cool to think Ms. Knightley was a good actress by directing her in well-received roles in Pride & Prejudice and Atonement--without his attentions, she’s languished a bit. But Ms. Knightley is back doing what she does best (aristocratic hauteur, wearing elaborate garments, telling off gentlemen), and this time, she’s got a complement of men to choose from. Though all of us English majors know how it ends, let’s form factions rooting for Jude Law’s Karenin or Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Vronsky--or, at least, let’s decide after the fact who had the most convincing Russian accent.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn--Part 2

Bill Condon

Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner

November 16

The series that launched a million magazine covers has finally ended (though the saga of its stars’ offscreen love will surely inflate the bottom line at many a media company for years to come). It’s the final installment of the Twilight series--or “Saga,” as the producers would Germanically have it--and if you waited a week to see any of the fine independent films released last week, get in line early for popcorn. Every tween and teen and regressing thirtysomething within a five-mile radius cannot wait to see just how the Bella-Edward vampire-mortal union ends--even though the book came out years ago! No matter. Fandom, like vampirism, is eternal.

Life of Pi

Ang Lee

Irrfan Khan, Gérard Depardieu

November 21, 2012

Another unfilmable novel adapted to the screen? It must be fall! Ang Lee attempts something of a comeback with his adaptation of Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel, wherein a boy and a tiger are trapped on a raft floating in uncharted waters. Mr. Lee has a lot to prove, having released a couple of films consecutively that couldn’t quite match Brokeback Mountain in terms of popular acclaim. Perhaps the transfer to a wholly new environment, with the challenge both of a dense, allusive text and of a, you know, tiger, will move him to new heights! If not, it’ll at least be the season’s most compelling misfire.

Les Misérables

Tom Hooper

Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway

December 14

Anne Hathaway has subjected you to her songs through lo these many Oscar ceremonies--and now she finally has the opportunity to belt it out on film! The world’s most energetic entertainer shifts down a gear to play doomed prostitute Fantine in the adaptation of the world-rattling Broadway show; her costars include Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe playing, respectively, the unfairly convicted Valjean and the doggedly devoted Javert. Other cast members in director Tom Hooper’s first post-Oscar flick include Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter as the garrulous-to-a-fault Thénardiers, but it’s Ms. Hathaway who’s likely dreaming a dream... of Oscar!

I suppose I ought to have known. I'm still sore at Ferguson over the lazy lecture he gave at Yivo a few weeks back, on a hot topic, Jews & Money, which turned out to be all cliches and chestnuts and threadbare Scottish homespun.

Whatever Makes You Happy, by Lisa Grunwald. Random House, 238 pages, $23.95.

This novel says New York in its first sentence, which is about the courtyard of the narrator's childhood building, recognizably on the Upper West Side. The opening of the story pro-per, in the present time-"Lying in bed with my husband one night, I am shocked to discover that I can't remember the size or shape of any other man's penis"-equally firmly defines Lisa Grunwald's territory as somewhere between Fear of Flying and Diary of a Mad Housewife, which is to say within the domestic novel as informed by feminism, smart-aleck humor, and an unacknowledged and probably not very conscious need to conform.

From that one sentence, you already know what will happen: Either the husband is going to be a schlub or nogoodnik who is eventually ditched for a better (more romantic, more glamorous) life of apparent liberation, or-the far more likely scenario for this middle age of the baby boom-the wife will venture outside the marriage, but without transgressing the boundaries of a Central Park West and Riverside Drive of the mind. The plot will be studded with excellent sentences and tiny mirrors in which you can embrace some particle of yourself, and it will melt away even as you consume it. It's skillfully crafted, but you've read it any number of times before. It so intelligently and justly ratifies the status quo that-in an all's-right-with-the-world kind of way-it will almost make you happy.

Researching happiness is the premise: Sally Farber, 40-ish mother of two and a best-selling author of previous volumes on anger, jealousy and love, is supposed to deliver her fourth book, on happiness, but even after two years of research, she's not sure she knows what it is or whether she has it, has had it or never had a clue. To thicken the mix, or at least to provide plotting convenience, the tenant of Sally's childhood apartment has died, and Sally's mother, the absentee landlady, wants Sally to prepare it for sale. (Real estate: What could be more New York?)

Sally also has a best friend always on tap, a foil so convenient she could only exist in a novel or sitcom. Equally conveniently, in setup terms, Sally's daughters-one 10, the other younger-are going off to summer camp for the first time. Spare apartment, children away, stalled book project: Of course Sally will have an affair; of course he'll be an artist, and of course he'll be world-famous; and, naturally, this will help her figure out that if her heart's desire isn't in her own backyard, she never really lost anything to begin with.

What redeems the book is its off-the-cuff observations; almost everything incidental is snappy and astute. The husband, for instance, is not a schlub but a doctor whose understanding of his wife partakes of kindness but not all the acuity she might like. Ms. Grunwald observes this kind of good-enough domestic love with nicety: "He turns to me now with a marital smile, a smile filled with wisdom and depraved acceptance"; "I felt the strenuous joy of his orgasm, and a fair one of my own"; "We share the bemused, wry sigh of modern wives in the act of preferring women's company to men's."

Ms. Grunwald is terrific on the artist, too, partly by making both him and Sally very knowing: "'Aren't you at all concerned about whether this is going to mean more to me than to you?' I ask him. 'Oh, I assume it will,' he says cheerfully and without hesitation. And then, with bone-crushing charm, 'simply because I'm a selfish shit and you're a goddamned miraculous angel.'" It doesn't take more than that to know why she falls for him and that, about himself at least, he'll be totally right.

Sally's material on happiness is also seductive, if in the manner of The New York Times' Science section, where you may have read some of it: studies showing that happiness tends to travel with the individual rather than follow circumstance and, therefore, remains level in individuals before, throughout and after the ends of marriages; studies of correlations between happiness and health; of the internal effects of smiling; of the propensity for error in predicting what will make you happy. Thinking philosophically, Sally may be less lovable, or not, as it takes you: About the concept of contentment, she wonders, "Is that happiness? Or is that only resignation wearing a funny hat?"

An observation like this, both gratingly superficial and insidiously suggestive, makes me want to answer the question in an essay immediately; it's most definitely not going to be addressed in any meaningful way by the loves or family life of a character as unconflictedly successful as Sally, or so basically in tune with what's acceptable. The book is, as its air of easiness demands, smaller than the sum of its parts. So long as you're not expecting Anna Karenina ("In this way he lived, not knowing or seeing any possibility of knowing what he was or why he lived in the world"), it won't really matter.

Anna Shapiro is the author of two novels and a collection of essays, A Feast of Words (Norton).

Well, in the latter days of July in the year 2002, a most important question was hourly asked in the cathedral city of journalism: Who was to be the new dean of the Columbia School of Journalism? And then the search was called to a halt, and a new question was hourly asked: What the heck is the purpose of Columbia journalism school?

It's like Barchester Towers all over again, with a twist. You know Barchester Towers , I'm sure: It's the Trollope novel that revolves around the complicated maneuverings-both personal and theological-that accompany the struggle for power in one of the great bishoprics of Great Britain.

The twist in the Columbia maneuvering is that in July, the chairman of the search committee for a new dean, Lee C. Bollinger, called a halt to the search and decided that what the school really needed to do first was search for a mission before a leader could be chosen to fulfill it.

Since Columbia is the High Church of the Journalism Establishment, it was as if, in Barchester Towers , they decided that instead of proceeding with the choice of a new bishop, they would first reassess the entire doctrine of the Trinity, with special reference to the Arminian Heresy and the doctrine of consubstantiation as opposed to transubstantiation. And suddenly, it seemed, all the poobahs and grand commentators on the Meaning of Journalism have gotten their knickers in a twist debating "Whither J-school?" and "What is journalism?" (or at least "What is journalism education?"). It's a full-fledged identity crisis, so why should I keep my thoughts to myself? (It would be a first.)

And besides, although I never went to J-school (I entered the profession as a fugitive from Yale grad school), I have taught part-time (for three semesters) at Columbia J-school (seminars on what they called "literary journalism." They asked me back; I just couldn't cope with the time demands); I've also been a recent "Visiting Scholar" at N.Y.U.'s J-school program, and I'm scheduled to be a "Distinguished Visitor" at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism next year (although after they read this, they may have second thoughts about the Visit).

So I've had a chance to observe J-schools as a kind of outsider or visitor, and I've formed some opinions about the fallacies that oppress the students there-and some suggested remedies.

I have no idea how the Columbia search committee is considering redefining the role of their school (although I was relieved by the recent op-ed in The Times by Michael Janeway, a member of the search committee, that it wouldn't involve something called "communications studies").

But I do think much of the debate I've seen has been on the wrong question. You have the snobby litterateur types who say, in effect, "I'm so smart and talented that I never needed anything as plebeian as journalism school." And then you've got the reverse snobbery

of "I came up from copy boy to coffee runner at the police shack, and the only real school for real journalists is Experience."

My feeling from my experience at J-schools is that what most needs to be examined is not the existence of J-schools per se, but the kind of unexamined assumptions about nonfiction writing, about truth and "objectivity," that one can find deeply embedded in what is taught about journalism.

These assumptions are not universal. There are many who teach at J-school who don't subscribe to them. But there is something built into the J-school curricula that has a deleterious effect on students. I'm not the only person to observe it: Recently a friend of mine, a very successful and gifted editor who often interviews and works with J-school graduates, summed it up quite eloquently when he said, "They beat the voice out of them."

It's a blunt assessment, but one that the Columbia search committee ought to pay attention to, because I fear there's more than a little truth to it-at least judging from my encounters with many bright, eager students at Columbia and N.Y.U. who have been intimidated by the ruling ideology of the J-school teaching profession into internalizing a contempt, even moral condemnation for the individual writer's voice in nonfiction.

Many of the students who'd signed up for the classes I taught or spoke to were ostensibly seeking to find their own voices as writers. They were idealistically, if quixotically, seeking to write long nonfiction pieces for the dwindling number of magazines that publish them. It's an ambition that's not entirely quixotic because such stories often lead to book contracts, and long nonfiction is flourishing in book publishing (at least compared to magazines).

By the way, the loss of magazine venues for this kind of writing can almost entirely be blamed on the cumulative effect of the various genius "magazine consultants" and other self-proclaimed experts charging exorbitant sums to parrot the simple-minded "wisdom" that readers don't have the attention span to read long stories anymore. Um, fellas, you genius consultant guys: Readers have been known to enjoy reading even longer -type stories if they're good. These are called "books," a term you may not be familiar with (you can look it up online if you need help). It's self-evident, or should be, that a long magazine story is not as long as one of these "books." So length is not the problem, is it?

So the cultural situation awaiting the students I dealt with was not ideal, but I admired their idealism in the face of the odds and felt sad they'd been shackled with a set of J-school fallacies that make things even more difficult, that "beat the voice out of them."

I think it has to do with the fact that J-schools profess to teach two kinds of writing: "straight reporting" (you can see the assumption of superiority built into the very phrase), and the kind of longer-form nonfiction still published in places like Harper's , The Atlantic and The New Yorker , among others. One doesn't necessarily need an individual "voice" in straight reporting, but "voice" is often what distinguishes work in those other long-form venues. But the atmosphere of J-schools is dominated by those who sneer at anything but voiceless journalism-a sneer that is confusing to students and is, alas, based on philosophic fallacies. Beginning with:

1) The Fallacy of Third-Person "Objectivity" : There's a strong current of J-school theology that worships the third person as if it were the Third Person of the Trinity, and that despises the First Person with a puritanical fervor, as if "I" were Satan's Own Pronoun.

Over and over again in J-school classes, students who had internalized this theology would ask me plaintively, "How can you justify using the first person-isn't the third person more 'objective'?" Or, literally, "Are you sure it's O.K. to use the first person?" I almost felt as if I were in Oliver Twist's orphanage: "Please, sir, can I have my voice?"

Not that voice is only a matter for the first person; voice can be communicated in the third person as well. But is the third person intrinsically more "objective"? In a word, no. The third person is certainly appropriate in most straight news stories. We don't need Congressional reporters to tell us, "Whoa, dude, I was really stoked when they voted to table that supplemental-appropriations bill!" But as for being more objective: The third person gives the illusion of objectivity, yes, but often at the cost of sweeping under the rug all doubts, skepticism, conflicting evidence and differing perspectives in order to present to the reader the simulacrum of a pristine, godlike perspective of Ultimate Truth.

The third person is like the Great and Powerful Oz of journalism-a schlumpy little guy hiding behind a curtain, exaggerating his omniscience.

Meanwhile, the first person is looked down upon as a kind of louche corrupter of the pure, shining truth. When, in fact, a case can be made that the first person is often more objective, more honest than the third person. The first person lays its cards on the table; the first person says, "This is not coming from God or some Platonic repository of truth, but from a single, fallible individual." It can be abused, sure; it can be used disingenuously-but it can't hide its singularity of point of view. At its best, first-person journalism lets its readers into the process and tells them: "This is what I took into account; this is how I arrived at my perspective; these are my doubts and hesitations. Take it for what it is." By the way, "voice" doesn't mean pure impressionism; it's something that grows out of intense reporting experience and disciplined soul-searching.

While those who use the first person are often accused by J-school types of "narcissism," in fact there's far more humility than the pretense of godlike objectivity in the third person. That's narcissism. Again, I'm not arguing there aren't places where the third person is more appropriate-but lighten up, J-school guys, on the moral condemnation of the first person. It's exactly the kind of thing my editor friend was speaking of when he said, "They beat the voice out of them"

2) The Second J-School Fallacy might be called The Fallacy of What Is Really "Hard News."

The idea that "hard news" is only about politics, economics and diplomacy is built into J-school ideology. Despite recent events that have demonstrated rather dramatically that such "soft news" subjects as theology are really hard news, reporting about ideas, about cultural questions (not just "the arts," in which J-schools tend to train narrowly genre-focused

reviewers), has only recently begun to get a foothold in J-schools-largely, I think, due to the influence of the late, lamented Lingua Franca , whose "journalism of ideas" I strenuously promoted in my classes. (Great news! According to The Times , Lingua Franca founder Jeffrey Kittay may be on the verge of reviving the magazine, which suspended publication a year ago. Memo to Columbia's search committee: Search no further-solve your problems by bringing Lingua Franca into the J-school.)

Even in investigative reporting, the J-school ideology holds that the really important investigative stories are about political and corporate corruption. It's still important to "follow the money," as Deep Throat enjoined Woodward and Bernstein, in order to expose corruption and hidden agendas in politics; but it's equally important to "follow the ideas" in order to expose the fallacies, the unexamined assumptions of conventional wisdom, the bogus expertise that often underlies politics and culture.

But the hierarchy of J-school-approved subjects of investigation tends to reflect the hierarchy of the newspapers it was designed to serve, which reflects the hierarchy of the political system it reports on. Meanwhile, someone investigating the special ideology of Wahhabism might have made us more aware of what was going on both before and after Sept. 11. But the idea of reporting on theology does not have the prestige of "hard news" at most J-schools. The "hard news" culture of J-school doesn't encourage deep, skeptical examination of the received wisdom of expertise; it cultivates, instead, a reverence for credentialed experts.

In fact, I'd argue that the journalism of ideas is not only harder news than conventional hard news professes to be, it's harder to report as well. All the more reason-if J-school has a mission at all-to make that a part of it.

3) The third, perhaps most controversial of what I'm calling the Three Fallacies of J-School might be called The Anti-Sensationalist Fallacy .

Beneath this fallacy lies the belief that the only real news is official news of state: news of politics and economics, news made by legislative bodies rather than human bodies, news made by people with credentials.

Cast into outer darkness and dismissed as "sensationalism" is news that involves the tragedies of ordinary non-credentialed people. I want to make clear a distinction between tabloid or "true crime" stories and celebrity journalism. Celebrity journalism is about famous people doing insignificant things. The best tabloid stories, by contrast, deal with ordinary people caught in extraordinary, often tragic circumstances. And isn't the most important story of all-the hardest of hard news-how we cope with the inevitable tragedies of life, with suffering, death and mortality? Are people to be condemned for caring about these stories?

Yes, if you listen to most J-school professors and administrators, who seem to spend an inordinate amount of time giving sound bites and writing op-eds condemning "sensationalism" or "tabloidism," without any evident understanding of why these stories are just as important as maneuvering over campaign finance.

I've questioned this knee-jerk assumption before: see my essay, which originally appeared in Harper's and is reprinted in my recent nonfiction collection The Secret Parts of Fortune, in which I posed what might be called "the Federalist Papers defense" of tabloid stories, as well as "the Anna Karenina defense." In the latter I've argued that from the very beginning, great literature was drawing on tabloid-type material: The Homeric epics revolve around the way the sordid affairs and sexual jealousies of the gods influence the fate of men and nations, for instance. And Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is a novel that could have been built upon a New York Post headline: "STRAYING WIFE THROWS SELF UNDER EXPRESS." Yes, it was a work of fiction, but many landmarks of 20th-century nonfiction-such as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood , Joan Didion's post-Manson essays on California in The White Album and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song -were built upon sensational tabloid slayings.

But I think the Federalist Papers defense might be more persuasive in this context, since it's founded on civic and political questions. Theories of the ideal polity, as the authors of The Federalist Papers recognized, are founded on theories of human nature. And the nature of human nature-particularly the effect of unchecked passions on human nature-is exactly what tabloid stories put under the microscope. The authors of The Federalist Papers were obsessed with "passions" and the body politic in much the same way that tabloid stories are obsessed with passions and the individual body. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison constructed and defended the system of Constitutional checks and balances on the grounds that they were necessary to check the easily inflamed passions of the populace. Tabloid stories are a reminder of the darkness within human nature that pure democracy is not always a defense against.

O.K., now that I've outlined the fallacies, let me suggest a few remedies:

1) Think of J-school as a school of nonfiction rather than just journalism. Some of the best, most challenging journalism is being done not in newspapers, but in books and magazines. But J-schools don't recognize this in the hierarchical ideology that puts daily-paper "straight reporting" at the pinnacle. Make a J-school education as much about writing as it is about reporting, and about more than one kind of nonfiction-writing books, for example, or documentary filmmaking.

2) Add a curriculum for future editors . Why all the browbeating and "boot camp" for future reporters and writers, and virtually no education for editors by comparison? I personally have been fortunate to work with only flawless paragons of the editing profession. But I've heard that there are editors out there who don't know the difference between line-editing and wholesale rewriting that imposes their voice; editors who "beat the voice" out of writers (check out Simon Dumenco's excellent recent essay on the subject in Folio online). Let's just say that disparity in skills among editors is at least as great as among writers. Here's where J-schools can fill a need. If writing can't be taught, maybe editing can.

3) Teach close reading as a journalistic skill. The thing that surprised me when I left graduate school for journalism was how much the close-reading training I'd had in the Yale English department served me when I lucked out and became a journalist with no formal training. The attentiveness to texts I learned studying the 17th-century Metaphysical poets (not to mention an attunement to the theological dimensions of experience one gets from them) proved to be of extraordinary practical use in the close reading of court transcripts, autopsy reports and Congressional testimony for telling ambiguities that were often trap doors to the real story beneath the surface of the text or the interview.

4) Don't abandon the police shack; don't abandon cops and courts and corpses. Here I hold with the hard-core old-school types: I believe the few weeks I spent traveling with the police reporter of the daily newspaper I once worked on, and the many subsequent encounters with homicide cops (whose gallows humor is, in some profound way, theological) and assorted underworld types in and out of court, was perhaps the most valuable training I had as a journalist. Before you can speculate about the meaning of mortality, spend some time in a morgue. (Even "arts" journalists ought to, since all great art deals in some way with mortality.) I recall that when I was briefly editing a short-lived but influential journalism review called MORE , we asked a number of eminent reporters-among them two of MORE 's founders, David Halberstam and the late J. Anthony Lukas-to talk about the time they spent as police reporters, and it was revelatory how much of an influence that raw, unmediated confrontation with reality and mortality had on them.

And besides that, look at Murray Kempton: He never stopped covering the courts-and brilliantly so-into his 80's. I rest my case. Frankly, I'm all for J-schools redefining their identity, but the collected works of Murray Kempton and some time on the police beat might be all the education an aspiring journalist who can't afford Columbia needs.

Well, in the latter days of July in the year 2002, a most important question was hourly asked in the cathedral city of journalism: Who was to be the new dean of the Columbia School of Journalism? And then the search was called to a halt, and a new question was hourly asked: What the heck is the purpose of Columbia journalism school?

It's like Barchester Towers all over again, with a twist. You know Barchester Towers , I'm sure: It's the Trollope novel that revolves around the complicated maneuverings-both personal and theological-that accompany the struggle for power in one of the great bishoprics of Great Britain.

The twist in the Columbia maneuvering is that in July Columbia University's new president, Lee C. Bollinger, called a halt to the search and decided that what the J-school really needed to do first was search for a mission before a leader could be chosen to fulfill it.

Since Columbia is the High Church of the Journalism Establishment, it was as if, in Barchester Towers , they decided that instead of proceeding with the choice of a new bishop, they would first reassess the entire doctrine of the Trinity, with special reference to the Arminian Heresy and the doctrine of consubstantiation as opposed to transubstantiation. And suddenly, it seemed, all the poobahs and grand commentators on the Meaning of Journalism have gotten their knickers in a twist debating "Whither J-school?" and "What is journalism?" (or at least "What is journalism education?"). It's a full-fledged identity crisis, so why should I keep my thoughts to myself? (It would be a first.)

And besides, although I never went to J-school (I entered the profession as a fugitive from Yale grad school), I have taught part-time (for three semesters) at Columbia J-school (seminars on what they called "literary journalism." They asked me back; I just couldn't cope with the time demands); I've also been a recent "Visiting Scholar" at N.Y.U.'s J-school program, and I'm scheduled to be a "Distinguished Visitor" at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism next year (although after they read this, they may have second thoughts about the Visit).

So I've had a chance to observe J-schools as a kind of outsider or visitor, and I've formed some opinions about the fallacies that oppress the students there-and some suggested remedies.

I have no idea how the new Columbia task force is considering redefining the role of their school (although I was relieved by the recent op-ed in The Times by Michael Janeway, a member of the search committee, that it wouldn't involve something called "communications studies").

But I do think much of the debate I've seen has been on the wrong question. You have the snobby litterateur types who say, in effect, "I'm so smart and talented that I never needed anything as plebeian as journalism school." And then you've got the reverse snobbery

of "I came up from copy boy to coffee runner at the police shack, and the only real school for real journalists is Experience."

My feeling from my experience at J-schools is that what most needs to be examined is not the existence of J-schools per se, but the kind of unexamined assumptions about nonfiction writing, about truth and "objectivity," that one can find deeply embedded in what is taught about journalism.

These assumptions are not universal. There are many who teach at J-school who don't subscribe to them. But there is something built into the J-school curricula that has a deleterious effect on students. I'm not the only person to observe it: Recently a friend of mine, a very successful and gifted editor who often interviews and works with J-school graduates, summed it up quite eloquently when he said, "They beat the voice out of them."

It's a blunt assessment, but one that the Columbia search committee ought to pay attention to, because I fear there's more than a little truth to it-at least judging from my encounters with many bright, eager students at Columbia and N.Y.U. who have been intimidated by the ruling ideology of the J-school teaching profession into internalizing a contempt, even moral condemnation for the individual writer's voice in nonfiction.

Many of the students who'd signed up for the classes I taught or spoke to were ostensibly seeking to find their own voices as writers. They were idealistically, if quixotically, seeking to write long nonfiction pieces for the dwindling number of magazines that publish them. It's an ambition that's not entirely quixotic because such stories often lead to book contracts, and long nonfiction is flourishing in book publishing (at least compared to magazines).

By the way, the loss of magazine venues for this kind of writing can almost entirely be blamed on the cumulative effect of the various genius "magazine consultants" and other self-proclaimed experts charging exorbitant sums to parrot the simple-minded "wisdom" that readers don't have the attention span to read long stories anymore. Um, fellas, you genius consultant guys: Readers have been known to enjoy reading even longer -type stories if they're good. These are called "books," a term you may not be familiar with (you can look it up online if you need help). It's self-evident, or should be, that a long magazine story is not as long as one of these "books." So length is not the problem, is it?

So the cultural situation awaiting the students I dealt with was not ideal, but I admired their idealism in the face of the odds and felt sad they'd been shackled with a set of J-school fallacies that make things even more difficult, that "beat the voice out of them."

I think it has to do with the fact that J-schools profess to teach two kinds of writing: "straight reporting" (you can see the assumption of superiority built into the very phrase), and the kind of longer-form nonfiction still published in places like Harper's , The Atlantic and The New Yorker , among others. One doesn't necessarily need an individual "voice" in straight reporting, but "voice" is often what distinguishes work in those other long-form venues. But the atmosphere of J-schools is dominated by those who sneer at anything but voiceless journalism-a sneer that is confusing to students and is, alas, based on philosophic fallacies. Beginning with:

1) The Fallacy of Third-Person "Objectivity" : There's a strong current of J-school theology that worships the third person as if it were the Third Person of the Trinity, and that despises the First Person with a puritanical fervor, as if "I" were Satan's Own Pronoun.

Over and over again in J-school classes, students who had internalized this theology would ask me plaintively, "How can you justify using the first person-isn't the third person more 'objective'?" Or, literally, "Are you sure it's O.K. to use the first person?" I almost felt as if I were in Oliver Twist's orphanage: "Please, sir, can I have my voice?"

Not that voice is only a matter for the first person; voice can be communicated in the third person as well. But is the third person intrinsically more "objective"? In a word, no. The third person is certainly appropriate in most straight news stories. We don't need Congressional reporters to tell us, "Whoa, dude, I was really stoked when they voted to table that supplemental-appropriations bill!" But as for being more objective: The third person gives the illusion of objectivity, yes, but often at the cost of sweeping under the rug all doubts, skepticism, conflicting evidence and differing perspectives in order to present to the reader the simulacrum of a pristine, godlike perspective of Ultimate Truth.

The third person is like the Great and Powerful Oz of journalism-a schlumpy little guy hiding behind a curtain, exaggerating his omniscience.

Meanwhile, the first person is looked down upon as a kind of louche corrupter of the pure, shining truth. When, in fact, a case can be made that the first person is often more objective, more honest than the third person. The first person lays its cards on the table; the first person says, "This is not coming from God or some Platonic repository of truth, but from a single, fallible individual." It can be abused, sure; it can be used disingenuously-but it can't hide its singularity of point of view. At its best, first-person journalism lets its readers into the process and tells them: "This is what I took into account; this is how I arrived at my perspective; these are my doubts and hesitations. Take it for what it is." By the way, "voice" doesn't mean pure impressionism; it's something that grows out of intense reporting experience and disciplined soul-searching.

While those who use the first person are often accused by J-school types of "narcissism," in fact there's far more humility than the pretense of godlike objectivity in the third person. That's narcissism. Again, I'm not arguing there aren't places where the third person is more appropriate-but lighten up, J-school guys, on the moral condemnation of the first person. It's exactly the kind of thing my editor friend was speaking of when he said, "They beat the voice out of them"

2) The Second J-School Fallacy might be called The Fallacy of What Is Really "Hard News."

The idea that "hard news" is only about politics, economics and diplomacy is built into J-school ideology. Despite recent events that have demonstrated rather dramatically that such "soft news" subjects as theology are really hard news, reporting about ideas, about cultural questions (not just "the arts," in which J-schools tend to train narrowly genre-focused

reviewers), has only recently begun to get a foothold in J-schools-largely, I think, due to the influence of the late, lamented Lingua Franca , whose "journalism of ideas" I strenuously promoted in my classes. (Great news! According to The Times , Lingua Franca founder Jeffrey Kittay may be on the verge of reviving the magazine, which suspended publication a year ago. Memo to Columbia's search committee: Search no further-solve your problems by bringing Lingua Franca into the J-school.)

Even in investigative reporting, the J-school ideology holds that the really important investigative stories are about political and corporate corruption. It's still important to "follow the money," as Deep Throat enjoined Woodward and Bernstein, in order to expose corruption and hidden agendas in politics; but it's equally important to "follow the ideas" in order to expose the fallacies, the unexamined assumptions of conventional wisdom, the bogus expertise that often underlies politics and culture.

But the hierarchy of J-school-approved subjects of investigation tends to reflect the hierarchy of the newspapers it was designed to serve, which reflects the hierarchy of the political system it reports on. Meanwhile, someone investigating the special ideology of Wahhabism might have made us more aware of what was going on both before and after Sept. 11. But the idea of reporting on theology does not have the prestige of "hard news" at most J-schools. The "hard news" culture of J-school doesn't encourage deep, skeptical examination of the received wisdom of expertise; it cultivates, instead, a reverence for credentialed experts.

In fact, I'd argue that the journalism of ideas is not only harder news than conventional hard news professes to be, it's harder to report as well. All the more reason-if J-school has a mission at all-to make that a part of it.

3) The third, perhaps most controversial of what I'm calling the Three Fallacies of J-School might be called The Anti-Sensationalist Fallacy .

Beneath this fallacy lies the belief that the only real news is official news of state: news of politics and economics, news made by legislative bodies rather than human bodies, news made by people with credentials.

Cast into outer darkness and dismissed as "sensationalism" is news that involves the tragedies of ordinary non-credentialed people. I want to make clear a distinction between tabloid or "true crime" stories and celebrity journalism. Celebrity journalism is about famous people doing insignificant things. The best tabloid stories, by contrast, deal with ordinary people caught in extraordinary, often tragic circumstances. And isn't the most important story of all-the hardest of hard news-how we cope with the inevitable tragedies of life, with suffering, death and mortality? Are people to be condemned for caring about these stories?

Yes, if you listen to most J-school professors and administrators, who seem to spend an inordinate amount of time giving sound bites and writing op-eds condemning "sensationalism" or "tabloidism," without any evident understanding of why these stories are just as important as maneuvering over campaign finance.

I've questioned this knee-jerk assumption before: see my essay, which originally appeared in Harper's and is reprinted in my recent nonfiction collection The Secret Parts of Fortune, in which I posed what might be called "the Federalist Papers defense" of tabloid stories, as well as "the Anna Karenina defense." In the latter I've argued that from the very beginning, great literature was drawing on tabloid-type material: The Homeric epics revolve around the way the sordid affairs and sexual jealousies of the gods influence the fate of men and nations, for instance. And Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is a novel that could have been built upon a New York Post headline: "STRAYING WIFE THROWS SELF UNDER EXPRESS." Yes, it was a work of fiction, but many landmarks of 20th-century nonfiction-such as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood , Joan Didion's post-Manson essays on California in The White Album and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song -were built upon sensational tabloid slayings.

But I think the Federalist Papers defense might be more persuasive in this context, since it's founded on civic and political questions. Theories of the ideal polity, as the authors of The Federalist Papers recognized, are founded on theories of human nature. And the nature of human nature-particularly the effect of unchecked passions on human nature-is exactly what tabloid stories put under the microscope. The authors of The Federalist Papers were obsessed with "passions" and the body politic in much the same way that tabloid stories are obsessed with passions and the individual body. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison constructed and defended the system of Constitutional checks and balances on the grounds that they were necessary to check the easily inflamed passions of the populace. Tabloid stories are a reminder of the darkness within human nature that pure democracy is not always a defense against.

O.K., now that I've outlined the fallacies, let me suggest a few remedies:

1) Think of J-school as a school of nonfiction rather than just journalism. Some of the best, most challenging journalism is being done not in newspapers, but in books and magazines. But J-schools don't recognize this in the hierarchical ideology that puts daily-paper "straight reporting" at the pinnacle. Make a J-school education as much about writing as it is about reporting, and about more than one kind of nonfiction-writing books, for example, or documentary filmmaking.

2) Add a curriculum for future editors . Why all the browbeating and "boot camp" for future reporters and writers, and virtually no education for editors by comparison? I personally have been fortunate to work with only flawless paragons of the editing profession. But I've heard that there are editors out there who don't know the difference between line-editing and wholesale rewriting that imposes their voice; editors who "beat the voice" out of writers (check out Simon Dumenco's excellent recent essay on the subject in Folio online). Let's just say that disparity in skills among editors is at least as great as among writers. Here's where J-schools can fill a need. If writing can't be taught, maybe editing can.

3) Teach close reading as a journalistic skill. The thing that surprised me when I left graduate school for journalism was how much the close-reading training I'd had in the Yale English department served me when I lucked out and became a journalist with no formal training. The attentiveness to texts I learned studying the 17th-century Metaphysical poets (not to mention an attunement to the theological dimensions of experience one gets from them) proved to be of extraordinary practical use in the close reading of court transcripts, autopsy reports and Congressional testimony for telling ambiguities that were often trap doors to the real story beneath the surface of the text or the interview.

4) Don't abandon the police shack; don't abandon cops and courts and corpses. Here I hold with the hard-core old-school types: I believe the few weeks I spent traveling with the police reporter of the daily newspaper I once worked on, and the many subsequent encounters with homicide cops (whose gallows humor is, in some profound way, theological) and assorted underworld types in and out of court, was perhaps the most valuable training I had as a journalist. Before you can speculate about the meaning of mortality, spend some time in a morgue. (Even "arts" journalists ought to, since all great art deals in some way with mortality.) I recall that when I was briefly editing a short-lived but influential journalism review called MORE , we asked a number of eminent reporters-among them two of MORE 's founders, David Halberstam and the late J. Anthony Lukas-to talk about the time they spent as police reporters, and it was revelatory how much of an influence that raw, unmediated confrontation with reality and mortality had on them.

And besides that, look at Murray Kempton: He never stopped covering the courts-and brilliantly so-into his 80's. I rest my case. Frankly, I'm all for J-schools redefining their identity, but the collected works of Murray Kempton and some time on the police beat might be all the education an aspiring journalist who can't afford Columbia needs.