Maus

So who is the real Art Spiegelman? And how has Maus stood the test of time now that graphic novels are considered a legitimate and serious art form instead of a totally inappropriate way to discuss deeply personal but also broadly political tragedies? Well, that's what his new novel MetaMaus will answer, ostensibly by adding extra layers of meta-ness on the cultural impact of the comics since publishing. Oh, and here's a book trailer, in case you don't like reading.

My own interest in Mr. Spiegelman is mostly limited to Maus (1991), his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book that made the Holocaust new and freshly horrible, and shlepped the horror across the Atlantic to Rego Park, Queens, where Mr. Spiegelman grew up, haunted by Auschwitz and his parents’ wartime ordeal. Everything else, as the artist himself ruefully acknowledges (“No matter how much I run, I can’t seem to get out of that mouse’s shadow”), seems, well, overshadowed.

The early work here resurrected was originally published as a slim collection of comic strips Mr. Spiegelman drew between 1972 and ’78. It includes a three-page prototype of Maus; the crushing “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” (about his mother’s suicide), which was incorporated into Maus; and several other unrelated strips that reveal an artist doggedly, sometimes desperately, working out the limitations and possibilities of his medium. Propelled by a modernist’s instinct to make it new, what he in fact achieved—having been shown the way by Mad magazine, circa 1955—is “postmodernism avant la lettre.”

Which would be exciting if it weren’t for the depressing sense hanging over the whole enterprise that Mr. Spiegelman is emptying out his desk drawers, that though he’s grown more sophisticated (and, if possible, more self-aware), he hasn’t found a new shtick worthy of his talent.

HAVING JUST RETURNED FROM my father’s 75th birthday celebration, I’m surprised to learn that wisdom begins at 65. Has my father waxed wise these past 10 years without my noticing? Very likely—and it’s because I myself am way shy of the magic number that I’ve failed fully to appreciate and honor the sagacity of my paternal unit.

But with the help of Andrew Zuckerman, whose huge, remarkable Wisdom (Abrams, $50) consists of photographic portraits of 50 luminaries over 65, I’m beginning to see the light. Mr. Zuckerman trains his camera on aged exemplars of unaccommodated man, close up—often very close up—no makeup, no backdrop, nothing to distract the eye from the naked presence of flesh that’s endured for at least six and a half decades.

The highlights? Clint Eastwood, splashed across the cover, looks laughably well (if you ignore his neck); Robert Redford is almost unrecognizable, not so much wrinkled as corrugated; Ted Kennedy, looking healthy (which is sad), radiates trustworthiness (who knew?); Henry Kissinger is the banality of evil personified, his eyes at half-mast—you don’t want to know what he’s thinking; Nelson Mandela is the opposite—cuddly at 90, which is an achievement; Jacques Pépin looks happy (is eating well the best revenge?); Vanessa Redgrave will clearly never be anything other than beautiful no matter how many years she hangs around.

Did I mention that the photos are accompanied by text? Words of wisdom from the luminaries. One sample will give you the idea, Ted Kennedy saying, “Representing Massachusetts in the Senate is the greatest public honor I could have. I grew up in a family that believed in public service. …”

Ignore the text and concentrate on the extraordinary photographs. And cast your mind back: Did Willie Nelson ever look like he was under 65?

Of all the prizes and honors heaped over the years on Maus , Art Spiegelman's great Holocaust cartoon, perhaps none was more telling than the distinction of appearing on The New York Times ' best-seller list first as a work of fiction ( Maus is sometimes called a "graphic novel," sometimes a "comic book"), and then-after Mr. Spiegelman's dignified objection-as a work of nonfiction. Maus tells the story of Mr. Spiegelman's parents' wartime ordeal, and paints an indelible portrait of the widowed father in old age, an insufferable, maddeningly tenacious survivor, noble despite himself. It's a true story, verifiably non fiction. But it also transcends fact: Maus is a work of art, astonishing in its oddity, its complexity, its power.

Part of that power comes from Mr. Spiegelman's talents as a cartoonist. His cats, mice and pigs give us a strange and utterly convincing perspective on Germans, Jews and Poles. Into the tiny frame of each panel, he packs visual information that enhances the story immensely-a thousandfold, if you buy the accepted formula. But I think it's the story itself-always the same old routinely amazing survivor's tale: courage, blind perseverance, dumb luck-that grips us, that calls us back again and again to witness the remarkable fact of human endurance.

Mr. Spiegelman's new book, In the Shadow of No Towers , is also about surviving-this time the trauma is 9/11-but it fails to tell a story: not a whole one, anyway, and certainly not a coherent one. Michiko Kakutani, in her New York Times review, seems ready to forgive the disjunctions and amputations on the grounds that Mr. Spiegelman has at least "suggest[ed] one aesthetic approach for grappling with the enormity of 9/11." She believes that with "[i]ts frantic, collage like juxtaposition of styles; its repudiation of traditional narrative; its noisy mix of images and words; its trippy combination of reportage, fantasy and paranoia," In the Shadow of No Towers somehow captures the essence of that terrible morning when the terrorists struck.

I wish I could agree. Mr. Spiegelman dazzles with his artistry: He flashes his wit; he shows off his remarkable flair for design. But he never hooks his reader, mostly because he hasn't found a way to tap into the tragedy of the attack-the "enormity," as Ms. Kakutani puts it, "of 9/11." Four times he uses the word "awesome" to describe the collapse of the World Trade Center towers-which he witnessed from just blocks away-but he has no access to the desperate terror of the people actually in the towers, and no words or images to communicate the aching grief of that day. He tracks his own movements on the morning of the attack and his fierce resistance to "the new normal," but he can't seem to broaden his perspective or show how his narrow focus connects with a wider context (the nation's false sense of security on Sept. 10, say, or the generous, citywide solidarity exhibited in the weeks afterward, or the postmortem investigations of the 9/11 commission). He gives us only the very personal and the bitingly political (furious and by now familiar attacks on "the Bush cabal").

In short, No Towers is interesting, provocative, even amusing-but not compelling.

The fact that Mr. Spiegelman doesn't tell a story (Ms. Kakutani calls this a "repudiation of traditional narrative") is only part of the problem, but it's a big one. The book consists of a preface; 10 outsize (141¼2-by-20-inch) pages, each one an installment of a comic strip called In the Shadow of No Towers ; a "Comic Supplement" that offers a capsule history of newspaper comics and explains, in part, the artistic sources of Mr.Spiegelman's own work; and seven plates of comics from the beginning of the 20th century, tacked on by way of illustration (and because they can be read, by the agile, as commentary on 9/11).

The 10-part strip is visually engaging and loaded with incident. Fans of Maus will be pleased to see the return of certain motifs, includingMr. Spiegelman's mouse persona, his perpetually dangling cigarette and his refreshingly well-balanced wife, artfully positioned as his foil. There's also a new and powerful motif, repeated on each page: a vertical orange grid-the latticework of disaster-instantly recognizable as "the image of the looming north tower's glowing bones just before it vaporized." It was the sight of "the glowing bones of those towers," he says, that unhinged him. The jostled, helter-skelter design of the pages reinforces the impression that the artist is still reeling from shock three years later.

Characters from early-20th-century comic strips romp through the pages, adding to the frenzy.This rather elaborate conceit is based on geographical proximity: The long-ago offices of newspapers owned by Joseph Pulitzer and WilliamRandolph Hearst, "the twin titans of modern journalism," are just a stone's throw from where the TwinTowers once stood. Mr. Spiegelman explains that "[t]he blast that disintegrated those Lower Manhattan towers also disinterred the ghosts of some Sunday supplement stars born on nearby Park Row about a century earlier. They came back to haunt one denizen of the neighborhood, addled by all that's happened since."

Mr. Spiegelman becomes some of the comic-strip characters-Happy Hooligan, for instance (with a dangling cigarette, naturally)-but though he morphs a half-dozen times, he's always center stage, parading his panic, his paranoia, his politics. Self-aware in the extreme, he comes close to acknowledging that the trauma he needs to survive is his own tortured psyche: One sequence shows Mr. Spiegelman somer saulting down the façade of one of the towers; the caption reads, "He keeps falling through the holes in his head,though he no longer knows which holes were made by Arab terrorists way back in 2001, and which ones were always there." Or again: "I know I see glasses as half empty rather than half full, but I can no longer distinguish my own neurotic depression from well-founded despair."

If the 10 strips show us a self-absorbed man shocked into a more perfect self-absorption, the preface is just plain irritatingly egocentric. In detail only publishing types could care about, we hear how the book came to be, what got left out, etc. From the first sentence ("I tend to be easily unhinged") to the last ("I still believe the world is ending, but I concede that it seems to be ending more slowly than I once thought … so I figured I'd make a book"), the preface echoes with the clamor of the first-person singular.

Maus was full of Art Spiegelman's father; No Towers is full of Art Spiegelman.

And no one, I'm sorry to say, will mistake In the Shadow of No Towers for fiction.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer .

Speaking from Paris on Dec. 29, Mr. Spiegelman told Off the Record that he had decided not to renew his contract, which is about to expire, as a staff artist and writer. Unlike his previous flights from the magazine under former editor Tina Brown, Mr. Spiegelman described this one as "incredibly gentle and civilized on all sides."

"There are things I need and want to do that don't fit the current mood of the magazine," Mr. Spiegelman said. "It is by default the best magazine around, but it seems much more about taking things in stride. Whereas, I just think the sky's always falling with more reason than ever."

Mr. Spiegelman said current New Yorker editor David Remnick told him that he was welcome back at any time, and could continue to design covers for the magazine. Likewise, Mr. Spiegelman said he hoped to produce freelance pieces for the magazine. However, Mr. Spiegelman said, right now he felt he no longer had a place fronting the latest dispatches from Nicholas Lemann in Washington and Ken Auletta from the Miramax catacombs.

"After Sept. 11, there was period when The New Yorker was as confused as everybody else and it was possible to produce very interesting images," Mr. Spiegelman said. "More recently the magazine seems to have quieted down its covers for one thing. On the other hand, the place I'm coming from is just much more agitated than The New Yorker 's tone. The assumptions and attitudes [I have] are not part of The Times Op-Ed page of acceptable discourse."

Currently, Mr. Speigelman's putting up all that pent-up agitation to other pursuits. Mostly, he said, he's devoting his energy towards his new comic strip "In the Shadow of No Towers" now being published once a month by the German newspaper Die Zeit , and reproduced in the United States by The Forward . He described his current endeavor as "recollections of Sept. 11, 2001, and the feeling of imminent death that it brought with it seen from further and further spiraling distances as we move towards a present where we're equally threatened by Al Qaeda and my President."

In addition, Mr. Spiegelman said, he's in the process of putting together a collection of his work from his 10 years at The New Yorker , which will debut as both a show in Milan and as a book in Italian in May 2003.

Looking back on his decade-long tenure with the magazine, Mr. Spiegelman said he enjoyed working for both Mr. Remnick and Ms. Brown, and produced covers he was proud of under both. However, he wasn't shy about pointing out the differences betweeen the two.

"Tina did a great service to the magazine by kind of rejuvenating it," Mr. Spiegelman said. "Even though it was with a lot of characterized criticism of what she did. And David is the inheritor of that. From where I sit it looks like David's trying to sew Tina's gains back into the earlier tradition of the magazine. And it must be said-I never read the earlier editions of the magazine. David grew up loving [former editor William] Shawn's New Yorker . Maybe it's a class thing, but it was never a part of my life. The sense I get is that it's trying to find an equilibrium that will reincorporate some of those issues. It's less interested in writing about a dominatrix than it was a few years ago.

"I find as much fault with David Remnick's New Yorker as I do with American media in general," Mr. Spiegelman continued. "It's insanely timid. But that's a criticism I'm not leveling at David. It's part of the zeitgeist right now. And it's why I feel I'm in internal exile."

Mr. Remnick was traveling and unavailable for comment and a spokesperson for the magazine declined to comment.

Even before "Golfgate"-when editors at The New York Times infamously killed two columns straying from the paper's editorial stance on allowing women members at the Augusta National Golf Club-the newspaper was at the center of the story. For months now, The Times has been crusading against the male-only policy at Augusta, making it a national story and forcing other publications to react to its news breaks and commentary.

But The Times has no monopoly on the story. In fact, several months ago USA Today scored a significant coup when it published a list of members at Augusta National. It included an array of well-known, and not-so well-known, corporate heavyweights and celebrities, including racing magnet Roger Penske and American Express C.E.O. Kenneth Chenault. It also included John F. Akers, who was identified as a former employee of IBM. What it did not say, however, was that Mr. Akers-who worked as IBM's C.E.O. for seven years, from 1986 to 1993-has served on the board of directors for the New York Times Company (in addition to four other corporate boards) since 1985.

Mr. Akers did not return calls seeking comment and a spokesperson for Augusta National declined to comment. However, on Monday, Dec. 30, a spokesperson for The Times confirmed that Mr. Akers is still a member of Augusta National, saying, "The editorial opinions of The New York Times newspaper, as well as the editorial opinions of the Company's many other newspapers, do not reflect the opinions of individual board members or the board as a whole. We make every attempt to make certain that our journalistic judgments remain completely independent." However, this is the same newspaper that called upon Tiger Woods to protest Augusta's practices by boycotting the Masters. The Times further called upon Mr. Chenault and others to "lead the way by resigning from the club."

When asked about the matter, Times editorial page editor Gail Collins said she hadn't known about Mr. Akers' membership and said it wasn't something she would address in an editorial, adding that Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. "tells us constantly we should never be influenced on what we think by the business side of the paper."

Martha Burk, chair of the National Council of Women's Organizations, has been railing against Augusta National's membership policy for months. Asked what she thought of Mr. Aker's membership in the club and on the newspaper's board, she said: "My thoughts when it comes to a board member of The New York Times are the same as a board member of any other corporation. They ought not to be members of Augusta. As board members, they represent the organization. And this is not a good way to represent the organization."

Late on the night of Jan. 3, either Larry Coker, the head football coach for the University of Miami, or Ohio State head coach Jim Tressel will hold the Division I-A national championship trophy following their match-up in the Fiesta Bowl. Yes, it'll mark the end of a perfect season for one of the two men (both teams were undefeated in the regular season). But, for The New York Times , it'll mark the culmination of an important few months in its ongoing transformation.

Once the below-the-fold, inside-page beaten-stepchild of the Yankees, Giants, Nets, Devils, Rangers (and whatever other New York-area team you'd like to bring up), college football has stepped out of the darkness for The Times sports section-becoming the center attraction for a paper looking to redefine itself to an audience beyond the Palisades.

While the New York Post and Daily News have spent their pages with the blow-by-blows of skirmishes in Jets practices and asking whether Giants tight end Jeremy Shockey should really be acting like the male Anna Kournikova, The Times has hit the road: to Ann Arbor, Mich., and Boulder, Col., to Lincoln, Neb., and South Bend, Ind., to the college-football crazed towns of the deep South and Midwest. From splashy features on the use of sex in recruiting to analytical pieces on the troubles of once-mighty Nebraska, The Times has made college football, for better or worse, the first thing many men see when they eat their Grape Nuts. What's more, The Times ' effort has brought to light the national agenda and interest of executive editor Howell Raines, who is now in his second year.

"Howell's from Alabama and he has a great interest in college football," Times sportswriter Jere Longman said. "As anyone who grew up in Alabama would, he has a great respect for what [former University of Alabama coach] Bear Bryant did for college football. It's an attempt to raise the national circulation. He wants the section to be more national and that's one way he feels he can do it."

Times columnist Serena Roberts described the new philosophy this way: "We've certainly become more aggressive in our approach to college football. And that's part of the national push that we've gone through. We're trying to be a paper that delivers to every region and not just one. We've certainly been more intense about being at games and more vigilant about being on top of subjects that are at the heart of college sports."

At its heart, the whole thing seems simple. College football, unlike any other sport, is followed in regions that, um, the Mets are not-particularly in high-growth areas like Florida, which features three national powerhouse teams. Not only would The Times like to woo readers away from their local papers, but also from USA Today , whose bite-sized morsels about the big UCLA-Cal matchup have tried to satisfy the needs of college football fans on the go.

Implementing the change, however, hasn't gone smoothly within the sports department, where Mr. Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd have been keeping a close watch. According to sources, even before the pair riled the department and journalists everywhere by spiking columns on the Augusta National Golf Club by Dave Andersen and Harvey Araton, they created a great deal of internal ill will by, as one source described it, "shoving this college football thing down our throats." According to sources, sportswriters have become frustrated over the scarcity of real estate to write in the Friday-through-Sunday editions of the paper, due to the section's new favorite subject.

"Because we have so many columns, so many inches devoted to this," one Times source said, "writers are being told there isn't enough space because they have to get 200 words into the paper on the Bucknell-Lehigh game or something."

Moreover, many have questioned whether the paper has risked alienating its home audience. The nearest big-time college teams are Syracuse, Penn State and (if you look only at the ambitious schedule and not at the awful results) Rutgers. None holds a place in the imagination of New York sports fans. Within the city, Columbia's Ivy League contests don't exactly pack in the crowds uptown, and Fordham University-long removed from the glory days of a block of granite named Vince Lombardi - this year made the Division 1-AA playoffs but inspired no great rush on the grandstands of Jack Coffey Field in the Bronx.

Nevertheless, college football has become a fall classic at The New York Times .

"It's outrageous," one Times source said. "That's the only way to describe it. Howell Raines is a big sports and college football guy and we devote unnecessary and excessive coverage to a sport that is not big in New York or the Northeast. I understand we're trying to be a national paper, but I don't know that The Times will ever be known as a college football bible ... which right now it's trying to be."

For his part, Mr. Longman recognized the dilemma, and said the directive posed new challenges for The Times .

"The question always is how much this plays in New York City," Mr. Longman said. "You have to strike a balance between what your New York audience wants and what the rest of the country wants.

"But another big question is, if someone's interested in the Nebraska game," he continued, "are they going to read The New York Times , or are they going to read the Lincoln paper, which will have four pages devoted to it? It becomes a struggle to provide something in a different way-to make a game story more like a review or full of interpretation or if you can featurize it, you have to give them a reason to want to read it."

There's no question that the paper's new emphasis on college football won a lot of attention from people across the country ... to the chagrin of some within The Times . After its computerized poll consistently and inexplicably ranked Notre Dame (the one big-time team, incidentally, with a large New York-area following) ahead of the then-consensus top teams, papers across the country-including Newsday and The Boston Globe -took their shots at The Times . The heckling got so loud, The Times addressed the issue itself in an Oct. 14 story by Mike Wise titled "Times's Ranking Leaves Many Mystified."

But while the poll proved embarrassing for some, according to sources, Mr. Raines lapped it up. According to one Times source, when people expressed concern to Mr. Raines, he was "very pleased it was getting that kind of attention." According to the source, when it was suggested that "it shouldn't be doing this and creating news," Mr. Raines said this was exactly the kind of attention which The Times should want. [A Times spokesperson said Mr. Raines was unavailable for comment and outgoing sports editor Neil Amdur didn't return a phone call seeking comment.]

Following the trend they'd set all season, The Times treated the week leading up to the Fiesta Bowl with a kind of fervor it had previously reserved only for the week before the Super Bowl. In the space of three days, from Dec. 25 to 27, the section fronted a feature on the mother of Miami quarterback Ken Dorsey, a profile of Ohio State coach Jim Tressel, and a column by Ms. Roberts featuring Ohio State player Ben Hartsock and Miami defensive lineman Jim Wilson.

"I think our attention to the national championship game is much more so than it was in the past," Ms. Roberts said. "And that's just part of our overall philosophy on how much coverage we do to certain things. Sometimes we do too much. But I think you have to give some sort of leeway to the adjustment period of time that window, and I think that's a process that's not done in one season. That's what we went through this year. We have to find our right balance. It's a work in progress."

Since October, when The New York Times announced its takeover of the International Herald Tribune from its ex-partner, The Washington Post, high-ranking members of the paper's brain trust, including executive editor Howell Raines and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., have been whisking (via the corporate jet) to the Herald Tribune's offices in Paris. Meanwhile, as The Times announced Herald Tribune staffing changes-most notably that Walter Wells would replace David Ignatius as Herald Tribune executive editor- Times staffers wondered what the changes would mean for them.

They got an answer on Dec. 26.

In a memo sent to members of the foreign staff, Times business editor Glenn Kramon and foreign editor Roger Cohen laid out the first in what promises to be a series of major changes for The Times , following completion of the sale from The Post on Jan. 2.

"We have always tried to help the IHT when we could," the memo said. "Now that good will becomes an obligation."

First among the changes, according to the memo, is the conversion of the foreign and business desks to a "24-hour operation" that'll be overseen handled during the sleeping hours by overnight joint editor David Rampe. Further, the memo, said, The Times plans to create rewrite banks in New York and Washington, and are discussing "long-term increases" to the paper's staff in Europe and Asia to further beef up the Herald Tribune .

Mr. Kramon did not respond to a call seeking comment. Mr. Cohen referred the matter to a Times spokesperson, who didn't respond for comment by press time.

further on the Jewish Museum's Mirroring

Evil exhibit are hereby excused from reading further. I understand the bridge

column has some thought-provoking bid strategies to discuss this week. Or those

who'd like to read about yours truly's brief moment of glory (ignominy?) on

Oscar night can refer to this footnote.1

For those of you still with me, for those of you who read my

original, fairly scathing review of the Mirroring

Evil catalog in the March 4 Observer

("Mirroring Evil? No, Mirroring Art Theory") I have a surprise: There actually

was one work of art (as opposed to

art-theory construct) in the exhibition that I found arresting. And there was

one artist who described one work of art she had not included in the exhibit, but which I wish had been there.

And then there is the matter of my decision to cancel my

appearance at the museum-sponsored panel "The Root of All Evil." A decision

that had little to do with the art at the exhibit, puny as most of it was, and

everything to do with the pain on the faces of the Holocaust survivors

picketing the opening of the Mirroring

Evil show.

Let me explain the chronology

which I think will help put my decision-which was not an easy one-in the

context of the whole controversy over the Mirroring Evil exhibit.

1) Late last year the Jewish Museum asked me to serve on a panel

on the question of art and evil with, among others, Robert Jay Lifton (author

of The Nazi Doctors ) in conjunction

with a museum exhibition that was to feature what was described to me at the

time in general terms as "art that makes use of Nazi imagery." I agreed to

serve because it's a subject I'd written about in my book Explaining Hitler , and because I was an admirer of Lifton's work.

But then …

2) I received the museum's book-length catalog of the Mirroring Evil exhibit, filled with

painfully pretentious essays by curators and art-theory academics, a catalog

that imposed a naïve postmodern moral relativism on the art. The ideology of

the catalog essayists implied that American consumerism was in effect equivalent

to Nazism, and the purpose of the art was to demonstrate "the Nazi in us all."

The essays were so one-dimensional, so deeply in thrall to art theory and

postmodern orthodoxy that my verdict was: "with friends like these the artists

don't need enemies."

Still, at this point I didn't feel any impulse to withdraw from

the panel. I'd been asked not to endorse

the museum's art but to discuss it, and I assumed that I could make the kind of

critique I made of the catalog essayists in my column when I appeared on the

panel.

3) Nonetheless I began to feel a bit uneasy when I learned, two

weeks before the scheduled date of the panel, that my two other fellow

panelists had dropped out for medical reasons. The person I was dealing with at

the museum spoke jokingly (I think) about "a curse" on the panel. But on

Sunday, March17,fourdaysbeforethe Thursday-night panel, the museum, as far as I

knew, had not been able to come up with any replacements for the cursed panel.

And then …

4) That Sunday night I saw the footage of the Holocaust survivors

picketing the exhibit's opening.

5) Actually, that's getting a little bit ahead of myself. It's

ignoring my experience of seeing the art. I had pledged in my first column,

when I was ridiculing the postmodern sophistry of the catalog, not to judge the

art by its pretentious promoters. I decided to see the art in the relative

tranquillity of the Thursday night before the official opening. An evening

which also featured four of the artists whose work was on display in a panel

discussion.

As for the art itself, well, this is something I wanted to say

but didn't get around to saying in my original skeptical look at the art-theory

hubris of Mirroring Evil . That the

art about the Holocaust I've come to admire is art that actually investigates . The way Claude Lanzmann's

Shoah investigates the killing

process, the way Art Spiegelman's Maus investigates

the experience of victims, survivors and their families. But so much of, almost

all of the art in Mirroring Evil , while it purports to be

daringly "about the perpetrators," doesn't investigate the perpetrators at all.

Instead it declares by fiat (or the curators in the catalog declare all too

accurately, alas, on behalf of it) that the way

to investigate the perpetrators is to investigate ourselves . To look for the Nazi within. It's appealing in that you

don't have to leave your room to investigate ultimate evil, you just have to

look in the mirror. But it's appalling because it doesn't take the trouble to

investigate whether in fact what we share with the perpetrators, the way we

supposedly "mirror" them, is as important or interesting as the way we differ.

Such differences (like the "secure divide between good and evil") are just

illusions to postmodernists, and it turns out to be much easier to gaze at the

mirror or the navel.

The only work of art in the exhibit that said something more to

me was "Hebrew Lesson" by Boaz Arad, in which the artist had taken some film

clips of Adolf Hitler haranguing a crowd and altered Hitler's voice so that he

was repeatedly made to plead in guttural Yiddish: " Shalom Jerusalem! I apologize! "

I would not call this a major philosophical investigation of evil

on the order of Shoah necessarily,

but it captured something of the poignancy of our helplessness before the

unchangeable face of evil in history. The unchangeability of history and the

way it gives rise to wishful thinking that is absurdly inadequate, but in its

very absurdity captures some truth about the way the mind works in the face of

the abyss of iniquity.

But it wasn't until the artists' panel that night that I saw a

work of art-one not in the show, but displayed in slides by one of the artists

in the show-that I felt truly lived up to the magnitude of the subject matter.

Demonstrated that it's possible for a work of visual art to deepen our

apprehension (in both senses of the word) of evil.

It was all the more surprising to

me that it was a work-or slide of a work-shown by Christine Borland, a Scottish

artist whose "Mengele heads" had, when I'd first read about them in the

tendentious program of the Mirroring Evil

exhibit, left me skeptical. The Mengele work ( L'Homme Double ) involved Ms. Borland supplying six sculptors with

descriptions of Nazi torture doctor Josef Mengele and commissioning them to

sculpt busts of him for display as her "work."

I'd already ridiculed the simplistic and effusive description of the work in the museum

program: "Nazi criminal Josef Mengele was known to his colleagues for his good

looks and charm and is infamous to us for his unspeakable deeds. To explore

this contradiction Christine Borland gave blurry photographs of Mengele and

descriptions of him to six sculptors …."

As if no one had noticed before that good looks, charm and evil

intentions could be found in a single individual. It was precisely the kind of

thing I was talking about when I said that "with friends like these the artists

don't need enemies."

And when I saw the "Mengele heads," the work itself, I wasn't

much more impressed. Again it didn't seem to take us deeper into Mengele's

head, it just seemed to make an obvious point about the heads, about the

unreliability of witness descriptions

But Christine Borland's other

set of heads-the ones she displayed in her slides at the museum's artists'

panel- did something more. Part of it was precisely because it was a work of

investigative art. She described how she'd been invited to produce some kind of

art project for the German town of Münster, and she found herself poking around

an anatomy museum which featured a department of human anomalies, among them

bodies displaying the disease known as "microencephaly," in which a person

suffers from a disproportionately small head.

She found connections between these heads and Nazi medical

experiments of the type that Josef Mengele sponsored and inspired. And then,

remarkably, she made a kind of art out of that. She had the heads scanned in

three dimensions by a computer. Then she had some plastic-fabricating company

make ghostly white busts of the heads from the scans. And then she mounted the

curiously, abstractly anguished heads, some heartbreakingly microencephalic,

some not, on poles. And set the poles in a garden. And there before me, before

all of us in the Jewish Museum, was something I had not expected to see in the Mirroring Evil show (in fact it was not

technically in the Jewish Museum

show) but which fulfilled the mission of the show in the way I thought none of

the official works did.

I'm not sure exactly why or how, but the vision of those heads on

those poles somehow became a haunting embodiment

of evil in art, a comment on evil as

art. It's interesting: One of the most illuminating encounters I had in the

writing of my Hitler book was with the philosopher Berel Lang, author of Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide and

the recent Holocaust Representation .

And one of the most illuminating things Lang spoke of was the way that what

distinguishes Nazi evil from other evil was the way Hitler and his minions had

turned evil into a kind of art.

Hitler as failed artist was in some way using genocide to sculpt the genome of

humanity, to carve out, by extermination, the master race in isolated artistic

"splendor." The heads of Mengele himself in Borland's Jewish Museum

installation really told us nothing, at least nothing new about that. But the heads in the Münster piece cumulatively

showed us what was inside Mengele's

head, showed us his vision, demonstated how evil could reach its most repellent

height as a demonic form of art.

Now let's return to "The Root of All Evil," the

grandiose-sounding title

of the panel I decided to withdraw from. Until that Sunday night I had every

intention of showing up.

And then on Sunday night things changed for me. Things changed

when I came upon local TV news footage of the protest in front of the Jewish

Museum. Sunday was the official opening to the public. There hadn't been any

pickets the night I attended the artists' panel. I know the museum had been

engaged in commendable outreach efforts to survivor groups, and had altered the

design on the exhibit to offer "viewer discretion"–type signs to warn survivors

that some of the material beyond the sign might be "disturbing" to Holocaust

survivors. I think part of me wanted to believe that this outreach had worked,

and that I wouldn't have to see, wouldn't have to face what I saw on the news

Sunday night.

But there it was. There they were. People with numbers tattooed

on their arms and pain inscribed on their faces. Shaking their fists and

raising their voices and bearing signs, and chanting to those entering: "DON'T

GO IN! DON'T GO IN!"

It wasn't what they were saying, it was the look on their faces.

It wasn't even that all survivors condemned the Mirroring Evil exhibit. But these survivors did, and I felt they

were speaking to me.

I couldn't argue myself out of the impact their pain had on me.

Maybe the best way to express it was what a friend of mine said

when I called her up to discuss it. She's the daughter of survivors. And here's

what she said: "There is so much that

has been done to these people, and there's so little we can do for them …. "

And one thing I realized I just couldn't do was add to the pain of a survivor in order to make some

points on a panel. The next morning I e-mailed the museum a cordial letter,

regretting the fact that I just could not cross the line the survivors had

drawn. I made clear I wasn't condemning others for seeing the art, for going to

the panel, for subbing for me on the panel. 

It was just something I

couldn't do.

One of the museum people I'd been dealing with called to tell me

that there had been no official picketing request thus far for the Thursday

night of the panel. It was a point I addressed in my letter and one I

reiterated to him: It wasn't required that some aging survivor stand out in the

cold Thursday night or maintain a 24-hour vigil. I couldn't not pay attention to what I'd seen in

their faces on Sunday. I couldn't not

pay respect to the line they'd drawn Sunday, even if they weren't there

Thursday night. I couldn't cross that line.

The panel went ahead with some excellent substitutes, I'm told,

and I'm glad for that. I'm also glad I wasn't there. Would my attitude have

been different if I had more respect for the art and less disrespect for the

art theory the museum catalog essays imposed on it? I can't say for sure. Maybe

so. I've tried not to be critical of the Jewish Museum for the goal of examining controversial art by a

new generation of artists. But I wish the museum hadn't so uncritically

embraced the trivializing postmodern ideology of the curators and critics it

lent its institutional imprimatur to.

But I think the best, most devastating comment about the whole

experience can be found in Art Spiegelman's remarkable, slashing full-page

6-panel New Yorker cartoon on the

show. It appears on the Back Page of the March 25 New Yorker . The first five panels show a seedy skinhead painting a

blood-red swastika on a city wall. And then in the final panel, we see the

portion of the wall with the swastika mounted on the wall of the Jewish Museum

as part of its Mirroring Evil

exhibition. And the skinhead being toasted by museumgoers for his "art."

Since Mr. Spiegelman is

(deservedly) a figure that so many of the catalog art-theory essayists and many

of the artists themselves pay respect to, as someone who found a unique,

expressive visual form to represent his family's experience of the Holocaust in

Maus , his comment is all the more

devastating a rebuke.

As is the import of Spiegelman's title: Duchamp Is Our Misfortune . It's an explicit reference, as many

readers will know, to a notorious 19th-century German anti-Semitic slogan

revived by Hitler's Nazis, one that is translated: "The Jews are our

misfortune."

To say "Duchamp is our misfortune" is not precisely to say "Postmodernists are our misfortune." I think it's clear Spiegelman is also referring

more specifically to Duchamp's famous dictum about art, one reverently cited by conceptualists and

postmodernists,  which comes down to

"art is anything an artist points to."

Our misfortune is to

suffer from art that in fact does no more than point. And doesn't even point

well. Art that is, in effect, pointless.

It had always been a dream of mine to appear in an Errol Morris

production. So even my nanosecond On the

Beach moment in his four minute Oscar- opening film was a thrill. But it

occured to me when Errol was filming interviews-using his "Interrotron"-for the

film, asking people what movies changed their lives, that I lived the first

half of my life anticipating nuclear holocaust (thanks to On the Beach ) and much of the second half investigating a holocaust

that had already happened. No wonder I'm such a cheerful guy.

Hopping into the Florida hot tub with The Times are The Washington Post , Tribune Publishing (owners of the Los Angeles Times and Newsday , among others), The Wall Street Journal , CNN and the Associated Press. They are joined by two Florida dailies, the St. Petersburg Times and The Palm Beach Post .

The primary motivation for this unprecedented "media consortium," as it is being called, is, saving dough of course. The re-re-count project is expected to cost more than $500,000–but may approach $1 million, sources said–with the news organizations splitting the tab. But participants also think the joint agreement will give the ballot investigation added gravitas. Times managing editor Bill Keller said the consortium effort will "probably have a bit more weight" than would solo efforts by each of its members.

Well, don't tell that to The Miami Herald . The pesky daily, which has been doing its own ballot analysis, may wind up shooting a torpedo into the bigwig national media's high-falutin' consortium. In fact, The Herald is on schedule to finish its counting within a month–at least six weeks before the consortium announces its returns.

"The reason we didn't join the consortium is that we wanted to run our own show," said The Herald 's executive editor, Marty Baron. The editor said his paper didn't want to attend "big committee meetings" where the role of the state's largest newspaper would be unclear.

And now it's pretty obvious that The Herald would like nothing better than to upstage the consortium's ballot investigation–particularly The New York Times and The Washington Post , which had approached the Miami daily shortly after the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide re-count of untabulated Presidential votes on Dec. 8.

At that time, top officials from the three papers, including Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Post publisher Bo Jones and Knight Ridder ( The Herald 's parent) chief executive Tony Ridder, jointly discussed aligning forces for a ballot examination. But fairly quickly, said The Herald 's Mr. Baron and The Times ' Mr. Keller, it became obvious that The Herald , armed with a decisive home-court advantage, was content to count alone.

"We felt we could be more nimble acting on our own," Mr. Baron said.

Indeed, The Herald soon proved to have the fastest feet in the post-election forest. Barely one week after the U.S. Supreme Court's Dec. 12 ruling essentially awarded George W. Bush the election, The Herald had made requests to the supervisors of elections in all 67 Florida counties, and a third of them had already granted the paper access. What's more, The Herald had hired a large national accounting firm, BDO Seidman, to examine the ballots, and that work, too, had begun.

Meanwhile, The Times and The Post and other consortium wannabes (a final consortium deal had not yet been struck) were having trouble finding an independent firm to assist their ballot-examining effort. Like The Herald, the fledgling consortium had approached the "Big Five" accounting firms to do the job–and, like The Herald, they had been turned away because of the firms' fears of stirring controversy and taking on such a massive project just as tax season began.

So once again, the national media heavies shot an affectionate glance southward to The Herald, which was making impressive headway in its count. Talks between the would-be consortium members and The Herald resumed, and though these conversations were longer and more detailed, they eventually unraveled again.

Participants said the points of contention involved the methodology of the investigation, the cost, control of the process, and final credit when a result was achieved. The Herald , having already done much of the initial legwork in Florida, wanted its name attached to the final result, a stipulation that Mr. Baron freely acknowledged. "Yes, we did want some credit for the Miami Herald ," he said.

But John Broder, The Times ' Washington editor, who also participated in the consortium negotiations, believed the breakdown of the second go-round with The Herald was prompted by issues of control, not credit.

"The credit thing was negotiated back and forth, and there was a lot of ego and institutional pride involved, but I think we worked that out eventually," Mr. Broder said. "The control, the scope of the thing and the research design–those were the real sticking points."

So once again, the bigwig media consortium and The Herald went their separate ways. And now, with the consortium finalizing its agreement in the second week of January, the Miami paper has a substantial head start. By Jan. 12, Mr. Baron said, The Herald will have either started or completed counting ballots in 35 of Florida's 67 counties.

And while its membership list is gaudy, the consortium's deal does not include several major media outlets which had also discussed joining the arrangement. Time , USA Today and the New York Daily News had all deliberated hooking up with the consortium, but dropped out for various reasons. However, the consortium is allowing additional media groups to join the ballot bandwagon late–so long as they agree to share the costs. ( Newsweek , which is owned by the Washington Post Company, will also have access to the ballot data, it was announced.)

And good news: The consortium finally got itself an independent auditor. The actual responsibility for examining the 180,000 ballots will be placed in the hands of the National Opinion Research Center, a survey firm affiliated with the University of Chicago.

The consortium estimates that the project will take eight or 10 weeks to complete. And while they got a late start, consortium members believe that they will have, when all is said and done, the official post-election bully pulpit.

"It's hard to imagine a group that includes The Times , The Washington Post, CNN, the Associated Press and all the others is not going to have a tremendous historic authority," said Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker. "More than any individual organization going out on its own."

Down in Miami, however, Mr. Baron didn't sound like he was quaking in his boots.

"This," he said, "is our backyard."

In his Dec. 28 column, Jeff Jacoby, the conservative Boston Globe columnist who was suspended earlier this year for borrowing material from an oft-circulated Internet e-mail, expressed indignation about an incident last summer, when CBS Late Late Show host Craig Kilborn aired a picture of George W. Bush with the caption "SNIPERS WANTED."

What if, Mr. Jacoby asked, "you're watching The O'Reilly Factor , Fox News Channel's popular interview show. The host is commenting acidly on the presidential campaign. To illustrate his point, he airs some video of Al Gore addressing the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. And as you watch, amazed, the words 'Snipers Wanted' appear on the screen as Gore speaks."

Mr. Jacoby continued: "It never happened, of course. But imagine the reaction if it had. If O'Reilly ever pulled such a stunt, he would be pilloried from coast to coast."

But four months earlier, on Aug. 16, Richard Roeper, a Chicago Sun-Times columnist who moonlights as Roger Ebert's new movie buddy on Ebert & Roeper, wrote: "Imagine if a right-wing pundit such as Rush Limbaugh went on network television and delivered a tasteless visual joke about Al Gore–something that would cross anybody's boundary of fair play. Something like showing a photo of Gore at the podium at the Democratic National Convention along with a flashing graphic proclaiming, 'SNIPERS WANTED.' Gee, you think ol' Rush would take some heavy heat for that?"

Pretty similar, huh? Turns out, though, that Mr. Roeper wasn't the first to use this device, either. Five days before his column ran, on Aug. 11, the New York Post published an editorial about the Kilborn incident, too. It began, "Suppose conservative radio and TV talk-show host Sean Hannity aired a video clip calling for someone to step forward and assassinate Al Gore. How long would it be before he was yanked off the air? Minutes? Seconds?"

Both Mr. Jacoby and Mr. Roeper said they were unaware of the previous iterations of their meme. Mr. Jacoby said the first place he heard about the Kilborn remark was from a report by the conservative media-watchdog group Media Research Center. "Yeah, I can certainly see the similarity in his opening, is that what you're talking about?" Mr. Jacoby said when he read Mr. Roeper's column at Off the Record's request. "I can't pretend it was the most, you know, brilliant insight–but I can tell you this is not something I've ever seen before." He added that when Mr. Roeper's column and the Post editorial were published, he was on suspension after his Globe bosses decided his July 3 column about the signers of the Declaration of Independence borrowed too heavily from material in a well-traveled e-mail (Mr. Jacoby and his supporters contended the punishment was far too severe).

Essentially, Mr. Jacoby copped to end-of-the-year hackery instead of borrowing anyone's stuff. He said, "The whole theme of this column–and it's the seventh year I've done a column on what I call 'liberal hate speech'–is how come liberals get away with saying things about conservatives that conservatives would get crucified for if they said it about a liberal? Each year I write it and make exactly the same point, and generally I'll start off with something like this: 'If a conservative said X, Y or Z, there would be an uproar.'"

Mr. Jacoby, in fact, took the Post editorial and Mr. Roeper's column as flattery. "Frankly, I'd like to think that after so many years of banging on this liberal-hate-speech theme … others have started to pick it up," he said. "So I look at this as vindication that some of the stuff I've written has had an effect."

The columnist's boss, Renee Loth, didn't have too much to say about the similarities. "I appreciate you bringing this to my attention, but I really feel this is the annual roundup he does every year," she said. "So I don't see much cause for concern–and as you know, I can be hard on these things."

Mr. Roeper contended that he, Mr. Jacoby and the Post all arrived at the similar phrasing independently. "I just read the New York Post editorial for the first time," he said. "Given the fact I wrote my column without seeing the Post editorial, it's certainly possible that he wrote his column independently of mine. I wouldn't accuse him of ripping me off," he said. Post editorial-page editor Bob McManus said the whole thing came down to a cliché: "This is almost a no-brainer in terms of structure. We use it all the time."

After getting eighty-sixed at The New Yorker , pot-stirring illustrator Art Spiegelman has found a home for his latest controversial drawing at The Nation .

Mr. Spiegelman's illustration, entitled "I Had a Dream …", depicted a tormented Martin Luther King Jr. in bed, feverishly gripping his pillow, with a beatific George W. Bush in a thought balloon above, wrapping his arms around his two black foreign-policy officials, Secretary of State-designate General Colin Powell and future National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. The piece was submitted for The New Yorker 's "Back Page" with the idea that it would run in the Jan. 22 issue, which hits newsstands on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Jan. 15.

But no dice; The New Yorker rejected the picture shortly after New Year's Day.

Once New Yorker editor David Remnick passed, Mr. Spiegelman started shopping the art around town–to The New York Times ' Op-Ed page, where, unfortunately for the artist, Op-Ed art director Peter Buchanan-Smith was on vacation and never saw the submission, and to The Nation , which snapped it up for its Jan. 29 issue, which will go to press on Jan. 10.

Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel was thrilled to land the Spiegelman art. "This symbolism of Bush on race and some of these appointments will more than likely be used to cover policies that harm the overwhelming majority of minorities," Ms. vanden Heuvel said. And she accused The New Yorker of short-sightedness in passing on the art. "I think this is a moment for magazines that see beyond the smiling faces of this administration and the kind of up-tone bipartisanship, and in that sense The Nation plays a role at these times," the editor said.

A New Yorker spokeswoman said that Mr. Spiegelman's piece was bounced because of "an editorial decision." "This is a magazine that turns down submissions all the time," the spokeswoman said. She denied that the piece was seen as too controversial and in the past, it should be noted, the magazine has run Spiegelman covers like a Hasidic man kissing a black woman and a cop at a shooting gallery where the targets look like civilians.

In fact, another picture by Mr. Spiegelman will run on the "Back Page," and this one will also lampoon Mr. Bush. Said the New Yorker spokesperson: "It's just something we thought more appropriate to run."

The day after Vanity Fair's Hollywood , that thick and glossy compendium of movie-star photographs from the Vanity Fair archives published just in time for Christmas, was dubbed a "bomb" in this column, the magazine's P.R. staff–which had been contacted for comment before the item went to press–whirled into action.

They would like you to know that the fact that the celebrity coffee-table book is being hawked half-price all over town does not mean it is not selling well. Christopher Sweet, the editor in chief of Viking Studio, which published the title, got on the phone with us to let you know that this is all part of a master plan, whereby the publisher will sell the book at half-price during January in order to keep it at the front of bookstores during the Christmas-returns season and hopefully right on through to the Oscar season, when Mr. Sweet hopes units will continue to move.

So far, the book editor said, out of a print run of 100,000, U.S. sales of Vanity Fair's Hollywood have hit between 60,000 and 65,000, and overseas sales (mainly in Britain and Australia) have disposed of 20,000 more copies. The book–even while selling for half its cover price–rose to No. 19 on The New York Times best-seller list.

"This is not being marked down and put out of print," Mr. Sweet said. "We don't often get on the best-seller list. This is a great book for us," he added. So there you have it: 21st-century bookselling. Swing , baby.

Hopping into the Florida hot tub with The Times are The Washington Post , Tribune Publishing (owners of the Los Angeles Times and Newsday , among others), The Wall Street Journal , CNN and the Associated Press. They are joined by two Florida dailies, the St. Petersburg Times and The Palm Beach Post .

The primary motivation for this unprecedented "media consortium," as it is being called, is, saving dough of course. The re-re-count project is expected to cost more than $500,000–but may approach $1 million, sources said–with the news organizations splitting the tab. But participants also think the joint agreement will give the ballot investigation added gravitas. Times managing editor Bill Keller said the consortium effort will "probably have a bit more weight" than would solo efforts by each of its members.

Well, don't tell that to The Miami Herald . The pesky daily, which has been doing its own ballot analysis, may wind up shooting a torpedo into the bigwig national media's high-falutin' consortium. In fact, The Herald is on schedule to finish its counting within a month–at least six weeks before the consortium announces its returns.

"The reason we didn't join the consortium is that we wanted to run our own show," said The Herald 's executive editor, Marty Baron. The editor said his paper didn't want to attend "big committee meetings" where the role of the state's largest newspaper would be unclear.

And now it's pretty obvious that The Herald would like nothing better than to upstage the consortium's ballot investigation–particularly The New York Times and The Washington Post , which had approached the Miami daily shortly after the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide re-count of untabulated Presidential votes on Dec. 8.

At that time, top officials from the three papers, including Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Post publisher Bo Jones and Knight Ridder ( The Herald 's parent) chief executive Tony Ridder, jointly discussed aligning forces for a ballot examination. But fairly quickly, said The Herald 's Mr. Baron and The Times ' Mr. Keller, it became obvious that The Herald , armed with a decisive home-court advantage, was content to count alone.

"We felt we could be more nimble acting on our own," Mr. Baron said.

Indeed, The Herald soon proved to have the fastest feet in the post-election forest. Barely one week after the U.S. Supreme Court's Dec. 12 ruling essentially awarded George W. Bush the election, The Herald had made requests to the supervisors of elections in all 67 Florida counties, and a third of them had already granted the paper access. What's more, The Herald had hired a large national accounting firm, BDO Seidman, to examine the ballots, and that work, too, had begun.

Meanwhile, The Times and The Post and other consortium wannabes (a final consortium deal had not yet been struck) were having trouble finding an independent firm to assist their ballot-examining effort. Like The Herald, the fledgling consortium had approached the "Big Five" accounting firms to do the job–and, like The Herald, they had been turned away because of the firms' fears of stirring controversy and taking on such a massive project just as tax season began.

So once again, the national media heavies shot an affectionate glance southward to The Herald, which was making impressive headway in its count. Talks between the would-be consortium members and The Herald resumed, and though these conversations were longer and more detailed, they eventually unraveled again.

Participants said the points of contention involved the methodology of the investigation, the cost, control of the process, and final credit when a result was achieved. The Herald , having already done much of the initial legwork in Florida, wanted its name attached to the final result, a stipulation that Mr. Baron freely acknowledged. "Yes, we did want some credit for the Miami Herald ," he said.

But John Broder, The Times ' Washington editor, who also participated in the consortium negotiations, believed the breakdown of the second go-round with The Herald was prompted by issues of control, not credit.

"The credit thing was negotiated back and forth, and there was a lot of ego and institutional pride involved, but I think we worked that out eventually," Mr. Broder said. "The control, the scope of the thing and the research design–those were the real sticking points."

So once again, the bigwig media consortium and The Herald went their separate ways. And now, with the consortium finalizing its agreement in the second week of January, the Miami paper has a substantial head start. By Jan. 12, Mr. Baron said, The Herald will have either started or completed counting ballots in 35 of Florida's 67 counties.

And while its membership list is gaudy, the consortium's deal does not include several major media outlets which had also discussed joining the arrangement. Time , USA Today and the New York Daily News had all deliberated hooking up with the consortium, but dropped out for various reasons. However, the consortium is allowing additional media groups to join the ballot bandwagon late–so long as they agree to share the costs. ( Newsweek , which is owned by the Washington Post Company, will also have access to the ballot data, it was announced.)

And good news: The consortium finally got itself an independent auditor. The actual responsibility for examining the 180,000 ballots will be placed in the hands of the National Opinion Research Center, a survey firm affiliated with the University of Chicago.

The consortium estimates that the project will take eight or 10 weeks to complete. And while they got a late start, consortium members believe that they will have, when all is said and done, the official post-election bully pulpit.

"It's hard to imagine a group that includes The Times , The Washington Post, CNN, the Associated Press and all the others is not going to have a tremendous historic authority," said Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker. "More than any individual organization going out on its own."

Down in Miami, however, Mr. Baron didn't sound like he was quaking in his boots.

"This," he said, "is our backyard."

In his Dec. 28 column, Jeff Jacoby, the conservative Boston Globe columnist who was suspended earlier this year for borrowing material from an oft-circulated Internet e-mail, expressed indignation about an incident last summer, when CBS Late Late Show host Craig Kilborn aired a picture of George W. Bush with the caption "SNIPERS WANTED."

What if, Mr. Jacoby asked, "you're watching The O'Reilly Factor , Fox News Channel's popular interview show. The host is commenting acidly on the presidential campaign. To illustrate his point, he airs some video of Al Gore addressing the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. And as you watch, amazed, the words 'Snipers Wanted' appear on the screen as Gore speaks."

Mr. Jacoby continued: "It never happened, of course. But imagine the reaction if it had. If O'Reilly ever pulled such a stunt, he would be pilloried from coast to coast."

But four months earlier, on Aug. 16, Richard Roeper, a Chicago Sun-Times columnist who moonlights as Roger Ebert's new movie buddy on Ebert & Roeper, wrote: "Imagine if a right-wing pundit such as Rush Limbaugh went on network television and delivered a tasteless visual joke about Al Gore–something that would cross anybody's boundary of fair play. Something like showing a photo of Gore at the podium at the Democratic National Convention along with a flashing graphic proclaiming, 'SNIPERS WANTED.' Gee, you think ol' Rush would take some heavy heat for that?"

Pretty similar, huh? Turns out, though, that Mr. Roeper wasn't the first to use this device, either. Five days before his column ran, on Aug. 11, the New York Post published an editorial about the Kilborn incident, too. It began, "Suppose conservative radio and TV talk-show host Sean Hannity aired a video clip calling for someone to step forward and assassinate Al Gore. How long would it be before he was yanked off the air? Minutes? Seconds?"

Both Mr. Jacoby and Mr. Roeper said they were unaware of the previous iterations of their meme. Mr. Jacoby said the first place he heard about the Kilborn remark was from a report by the conservative media-watchdog group Media Research Center. "Yeah, I can certainly see the similarity in his opening, is that what you're talking about?" Mr. Jacoby said when he read Mr. Roeper's column at Off the Record's request. "I can't pretend it was the most, you know, brilliant insight–but I can tell you this is not something I've ever seen before." He added that when Mr. Roeper's column and the Post editorial were published, he was on suspension after his Globe bosses decided his July 3 column about the signers of the Declaration of Independence borrowed too heavily from material in a well-traveled e-mail (Mr. Jacoby and his supporters contended the punishment was far too severe).

Essentially, Mr. Jacoby copped to end-of-the-year hackery instead of borrowing anyone's stuff. He said, "The whole theme of this column–and it's the seventh year I've done a column on what I call 'liberal hate speech'–is how come liberals get away with saying things about conservatives that conservatives would get crucified for if they said it about a liberal? Each year I write it and make exactly the same point, and generally I'll start off with something like this: 'If a conservative said X, Y or Z, there would be an uproar.'"

Mr. Jacoby, in fact, took the Post editorial and Mr. Roeper's column as flattery. "Frankly, I'd like to think that after so many years of banging on this liberal-hate-speech theme … others have started to pick it up," he said. "So I look at this as vindication that some of the stuff I've written has had an effect."

The columnist's boss, Renee Loth, didn't have too much to say about the similarities. "I appreciate you bringing this to my attention, but I really feel this is the annual roundup he does every year," she said. "So I don't see much cause for concern–and as you know, I can be hard on these things."

Mr. Roeper contended that he, Mr. Jacoby and the Post all arrived at the similar phrasing independently. "I just read the New York Post editorial for the first time," he said. "Given the fact I wrote my column without seeing the Post editorial, it's certainly possible that he wrote his column independently of mine. I wouldn't accuse him of ripping me off," he said. Post editorial-page editor Bob McManus said the whole thing came down to a cliché: "This is almost a no-brainer in terms of structure. We use it all the time."

After getting eighty-sixed at The New Yorker , pot-stirring illustrator Art Spiegelman has found a home for his latest controversial drawing at The Nation .

Mr. Spiegelman's illustration, entitled "I Had a Dream …", depicted a tormented Martin Luther King Jr. in bed, feverishly gripping his pillow, with a beatific George W. Bush in a thought balloon above, wrapping his arms around his two black foreign-policy officials, Secretary of State-designate General Colin Powell and future National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. The piece was submitted for The New Yorker 's "Back Page" with the idea that it would run in the Jan. 22 issue, which hits newsstands on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Jan. 15.

But no dice; The New Yorker rejected the picture shortly after New Year's Day.

Once New Yorker editor David Remnick passed, Mr. Spiegelman started shopping the art around town–to The New York Times ' Op-Ed page, where, unfortunately for the artist, Op-Ed art director Peter Buchanan-Smith was on vacation and never saw the submission, and to The Nation , which snapped it up for its Jan. 29 issue, which will go to press on Jan. 10.

Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel was thrilled to land the Spiegelman art. "This symbolism of Bush on race and some of these appointments will more than likely be used to cover policies that harm the overwhelming majority of minorities," Ms. vanden Heuvel said. And she accused The New Yorker of short-sightedness in passing on the art. "I think this is a moment for magazines that see beyond the smiling faces of this administration and the kind of up-tone bipartisanship, and in that sense The Nation plays a role at these times," the editor said.

A New Yorker spokeswoman said that Mr. Spiegelman's piece was bounced because of "an editorial decision." "This is a magazine that turns down submissions all the time," the spokeswoman said. She denied that the piece was seen as too controversial and in the past, it should be noted, the magazine has run Spiegelman covers like a Hasidic man kissing a black woman and a cop at a shooting gallery where the targets look like civilians.

In fact, another picture by Mr. Spiegelman will run on the "Back Page," and this one will also lampoon Mr. Bush. Said the New Yorker spokesperson: "It's just something we thought more appropriate to run."

The day after Vanity Fair's Hollywood , that thick and glossy compendium of movie-star photographs from the Vanity Fair archives published just in time for Christmas, was dubbed a "bomb" in this column, the magazine's P.R. staff–which had been contacted for comment before the item went to press–whirled into action.

They would like you to know that the fact that the celebrity coffee-table book is being hawked half-price all over town does not mean it is not selling well. Christopher Sweet, the editor in chief of Viking Studio, which published the title, got on the phone with us to let you know that this is all part of a master plan, whereby the publisher will sell the book at half-price during January in order to keep it at the front of bookstores during the Christmas-returns season and hopefully right on through to the Oscar season, when Mr. Sweet hopes units will continue to move.

So far, the book editor said, out of a print run of 100,000, U.S. sales of Vanity Fair's Hollywood have hit between 60,000 and 65,000, and overseas sales (mainly in Britain and Australia) have disposed of 20,000 more copies. The book–even while selling for half its cover price–rose to No. 19 on The New York Times best-seller list.

"This is not being marked down and put out of print," Mr. Sweet said. "We don't often get on the best-seller list. This is a great book for us," he added. So there you have it: 21st-century bookselling. Swing , baby.