Does that look like $185 worth of tea? (Photo: AFP/Getty)

We met outside the Forbidden City, under the large portrait of Mao. I was en route to see the great leader’s embalmed body, which lies in a mausoleum across the street in Tiananmen Square. She was heading that way too.

“Travel alone?” she asked, after bumping into me by accident.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Me too.”

It was mid-April, a couple weeks ago. The sun shined brightly. Not the polluted Beijing air you read so much about. It was a good day to be a tourist.

She told me her name was Xin and that she hailed from Shaanxi, near Xi’an, home of the terracotta warriors. She’d flown into town that week for a wedding and had the day to herself.  

I’ve always approached travel as an opportunity to not just see the sights, but to meet new people. In this case it was a woman who was going my way and offered to show me around. The Chinese are well known for their hospitality (I’ve been the recipient of much over the years), and it didn’t strike me as anything out of the ordinary.

She spoke English well, far better than most Chinese I’d met on my visits to the mainland, the result, she said, of practicing online with Westerners. “I like practice English,” she told me as we walked in a tunnel toward Tiananmen.

After emerging into the vast square, we approached Mao’s Mausoleum and saw a long line of tourists snaking between barriers. Xin and I both sighed. “Maybe,” she said. “We walk around hutongs instead.” I liked her thinking. Off we went to explore Beijing’s old alleyways.

As we walked through the winding streets, we talked about our families: my wife, her husband and three year-old boy.

We talked about the Tiananmen protests in 1989. “I was young, I see it on news and then one day no more,” she said. We talked about our shared love of international travel. Mine real, hers imagined. She wanted to visit New York. I told her I used to live there.

“You are lucky man,” she said. “You see so much. I never leave China.”

“You will see a lot too,” I said. “More money in China now.”

After half an hour I had to go. I was meeting my friend, Nina, for lunch.

“Have time for quick tea?” Xin asked.

I checked the time. “Very quick.”

She found a teahouse beneath a couple restaurants—dumpling and duck—on a bustling street.

In a private room she ordered two pots of tea. Pu-erh for her, jasmine for me. “My treat,” I said. She’d been so kind to me, the embodiment of Chinese hospitality. “I love meeting people when I travel,” I said.

We finished the tea quickly and the bill arrived. My jaw dropped.

“Tea in China very expensive,” Xin said.

Stunned, I typed 1,140 RMB on my phone, just to make sure my mental calculus was correct.

“This much?” I asked showing her the screen.

“I don’t know your money,” she said. “But yes, RMB correct.”

“$185?” I asked in disbelief. I’d never heard of something so outrageous, since tea for two people usually costs around $10 in Hong Kong. Unsure of what to do, I blurted, “Can we split it?”

“Yes,” Xin said. I handed my credit card to the waitress and signed for 570 RMB, about $92.

In New York, con artists scam tourists with the broken glasses/bottle trick. While walking, someone brushes up against you and either drops a pair of glasses or a bag with an “expensive” bottle of wine in it. Then they wave a receipt and demand compensation for said broken item. A couple years ago in New York, a con artist named Naim Jabbar got sentenced to seven years for the broken glasses scam. But this wasn’t New York.

I didn’t realize I’d been had until I met Nina. At lunch she called a friend who lives in Beijing and explained the situation. “Call your bank,” she said about a half second into the call. “It’s a scam.”

After canceling my credit card, we headed back to the teahouse with seven Beijing cops in tow. Once inside I confronted the owner. He denied everything. The waitress, who I’d seen less than an hour earlier, looked at me blankly.

The lies continued until one of the cops sat the owner down. “Just give him his money back,” he said wearily. The owner reluctantly complied. He headed to the till and fetched 500 RMB.

“I paid 570,” I said.

“The tea cost 70,” he replied waving me off.

“Give me the rest of my money,” I demanded.

He returned to the till and withdrew 70 more RMB.

As we left the teahouse it dawned on me that the cops never punished the teahouse owner or fined him. He was free to continue the scam that he ran in tandem with Xin.

The next day I went sightseeing again. Again, I found myself in Tiananmen. Earlier in the day three girls had asked me if I wanted to practice English with them. I ignored them. Sitting down in the square, I opened my map to find my next destination. Two more girls approached me, one with long hair, another with short hair. “Speak English?” Short Hair asked. “Want to drink tea?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to pay 1000 RMB for it.” They turned to leave. “Wait,” I said, stopping them. Then I asked them to tell me about the scam.

For the next ten minutes they did. They told me they get 20 percent of the cut, but business had been off recently. I asked if they ever feel bad about what they do. “Sometimes,” Long Hair said. “But foreigners have stolen from us for so long that we don’t care if we steal from them.”

Long Hair said she once had an American boss who promised to get her a visa to the U.S. and later fired her. “This is how I get back at him.” Short Hair blamed the Chinese government. “They’re rubbish!” she exclaimed, saying that only the people at the top have gotten wealthy while everyone else suffers. Mostly, however, they bemoaned the fact that people didn’t want to drink tea with them.

“Why do you think?” Long Hair asked me.

As a professional actor, I had lots of advice.  “Well, for one thing, your approach is too obvious. People know it’s a scam when you walk up and say, ‘Speak English? Drink tea?’ For it to work you have to earn people’s trust, befriend them.” Then I caught myself. Why was I improving a couple of con artists?

“Ah, yes,” Short Hair said. “Americans like you are very clever. But still you would never fall for that.”

“Of course not,” I said. “I used to live inNew York City. I’m far too clever to fall for that.”

editorial@observer.com

The ancient admonition seems the only way to hedge the reflection that as bad as Citi’s problems are, how much worse might they have been had Walter Wriston still been running the bank. It was the late Citibank CEO who, when he took over from George Moore in 1967, contrived to implant the go-go gene in the venerable institution’s DNA. Of course, it could have been worse. Wriston liked to boast that two presidents had offered him the Treasury secretaryship. Just imagine …

It was Walter (“Countries don’t go broke”) Wriston who pushed ahead in petrodollar lending, which effectively minted/printed billions of offshore dollars without the by-your-leave of the Fed. These dollars eventually found their way home (it is a tenet of faith with me that currencies are like Atlantic salmon; they always make their way back to the tributary in which they were spawned) and hello, Paul Volcker! In 1986, I even wrote a thriller, The Ropespinner Conspiracy (available online for $0.01 plus postage) that posited a Soviet “economic mole” introduced into the U.S. financial system to destroy it by doing exactly what Wriston and Citi were up to.

Now Citi is playing out the inescapable endgame of the Wriston-Weill (an amateur Wriston) legacy. It’s like a rigged baccarat game with the taxpayer holding the bank. How it will play out, knows God. One thing I am convinced of. Having watched Vikram Pandit on Charlie Rose (and you can, too, either on Charlie’s Web site or on YouTube), I have no doubt he’s unequal to the task—to put it about as kindly as I can.

And now BofA has done a degree-of-difficulty 9.8 full gainer into the soup, which had to be inevitable in a multibillion dollar deal (acquisition of Merrill Lynch) cobbled over a weekend under the gun. While it’s kind of fun to watch the Blowhard of Charlotte (I am no fan of Ken Lewis) squirm, this hits all of us so, schadenfreude will just have to wait its turn.

What to do, what to do, what to do?

One thing that strikes me about the way the present mess/crisis is being dealt with is how little imagination has been deployed. I never expected much from Henry Paulson, who comes across in Charlie Ellis’ extensive history of Goldman Sachs as mainly a smile-and-a-handshake guy and a ruthless office politician.

Now it’s reported that Mr. Paulson and F.D.I.C. suprema Sheila Bair are looking into some kind of “aggregator bank” to buy toxic assets off bank balance sheets. I have a kind of wild idea that might make this notion interesting.

One of the problems with the “global” crisis is that it isn’t being addressed globally. Washington, London, Brussels, Moscow, Tokyo, Riyadh, Beijing, Canberra: Each is doing its own thing. Nothing’s in sync. I think it would do wonders if some semblance of unity and cooperation could be implemented.

So, start with a few realistic givens: China has upward of a trillion dollars of U.S. Treasuries. In today’s markets, a holding on this scale could not be liquidated to any significant degree without horrific losses or a U.S. default—which would be the end of the world.

Yields on treasuries have drastically shrunk. Returns are virtually negligible.

The best thing that could happen to China’s domestic economy would be the recovery of the U.S. economy. By now, the latter has been so “consumerized” that only by restoring the confidence and creditworthiness of the consumer, and all who sail in him/her—mainly lenders—can a recovery be accomplished.

So here’s my idea:

Beijing and Washington would organize a joint U.S.-China “covered” fund that would start life underpinned by a trust fund into which China would put, say, $500 billion of its U.S. Treasuries in return for an equal face amount of trust certificates carrying a better interest rate than the underlying treasuries.

This fund would make/purchase loans in the U.S. by exchanging its own debt securities (backed by the treasuries contributed by Beijing) with holders of toxic CDOs, etc., on some rational value basis. Bang for the buck would be doubled: The money-good trust certificates exchanged for “toxic” assets would count as balance-sheet capital, while doubtful assets would be removed from balance sheets. Pricing would, of course, be crucial—but then it always has been, right from the outset of the present crisis. As a way of making sure that this new capital goes where it belongs—to the retail level of credit—participating institutions would agree to increase their loan books by, say, 10 percent per annum.

Profits would be split 60-40 between the U.S. taxpayer and China, which would also receive interest. If necessary, an equity feature might be incorporated. And, incidentally, the way to deal with the question of “bank nationalization” is for Uncle Sam to agree that, when and if the time comes, equity stakes received in consequence of bailouts will be offered via rights to the then-stockholders of the affected institutions and their successors. 

Most important, the recovery effort would be globalized, what with Beijing and Washington each putting a shoulder to the wheel. This, more than anything, is what the world needs to see.

That was assuming, however, that I was going to be able to tune into any action. Chinese television's interest in the rest of the world waxes and wanes unpredictably. Two seasons ago, the Super Bowl showed up on two different channels; this past season, it was on none. As America waited for the election results, the only sign of the outside world I could find in Beijing was an international swim meet on the sports channel.

Being an expatriate is not the same thing as being a citizen of the world. Ernest Hemingway, the Midwesterner who'd tried exile in Paris and Spain, set out to write a novel about a man fighting on the Communist side in the Spanish Civil War. What he came up with was so red-blooded American that John McCain declared For Whom the Bell Tolls his favorite book, and told of how he'd meditated on its hero while the Communists held him as a prisoner of war.

I rarely feel more American, or prouder to be American, than I do in China. This is particularly true if I am in China and in the presence of Europeans. Pluck a European out of context--take away his grand old cities and his cured meats and his comprehensive social-services systems, and put him against a backdrop as foreign to him as it is to you--and what's left more often than not is a watery-eyed person with silly glasses and mismatched clothes and a pathetic need for cigarettes, a dependence implanted in him through the marketing efforts of American business.

All of which is to say that, of the four or five election-watching parties available, most of my friends were going to the one at the French wine bar. But I wanted to know about Indiana before I could face it. If Indiana went blue when the polls closed, then the predictions were right and Obama was going to win. The last time I picked a state as an indicator was in 2000, when I told myself that if Florida went quickly for Gore, it was going to be an easy night. I hadn't counted on Florida coming back down off the board, which I witnessed in a crowded ballroom at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., and which indirectly but definitely had led to my ending up by Election Day 2008 in Beijing instead of Silver Spring, Maryland.

Indiana! The Internet was not helping. Fivethirtyeight.com had disappeared behind the Great Firewall sometime in the previous week.

Nobody else had anything at first glance, and before I could start digging, it was time to take the baby to morning preschool. Or pre-preschool, whatever you call it. Another downside to having election might in the morning.

On my way out of the complex where the preschool is, I was passing the doorway of a medical center when I spotted a TV in the waiting room, tuned to CNN. I stopped in my tracks. Kentucky was going for McCain; Obama was behind in Virginia. It was early and tiny and meaningless, but it was impossible not to feel that lurching feeling, like when Florida changed color, or when the first returns on John Kerry started coming in below the exit polls. I swore and stared from the hallway till a receptionist came out from behind her station to have a look at the screen.

I checked the Web again when I got home. No Indiana, but things were moving for Obama. I stuffed my laptop in my backpack and headed for the wine bar.

It was almost a nice day; the Beijing smog, the cost of progress, filtered the otherwise bright autumn morning light, as if the whole city were set off behind tinted glass. Down at the corner market, they had put out a mountain of the year's last cabbages, a tradition held over from the old days of rationed food. On Eastern Drum Tower Avenue, piles of bricks and dirt and paving blocks lined the way. The whole street had been modernized and beautified in advance of the Olympics, but now another round of improvement was underway. A spool of cable thicker than an arm was being unrolled alongside the digging.

When you're a foreigner acting as a foreigner, the city of millions contracts to a small town. Like most parties, the election party was about one-third friends, one-third strangers, and one-third people I had met and probably chatted with but could not place. Some of them were drinking white wine; some were drinking coffee. The gabble of CNN played over the in-house speakers and it took a moment for me to find the television: a medium-large flat screen on the far wall. The video scarcely made it less confusing. In an information-thin environment, American cable news is not like drinking from a firehose; it's like trying to eat peanuts with a spoon out of a bag containing one part peanuts to 20 parts peanut shells and horsehair scraps. Maybe I was tired. I looked longingly at someone's espresso, calculated the effect of concentrated coffee on my agitation, and settled for an entire pot of jasmine tea.

The CNN picture froze as I was starting in on the tea. Bandwidth problem: the wine bar was getting CNN through its Internet connection, and somebody had logged into a video chat on a laptop. The offender was found and disconnected, and the coverage came back. Obama had Ohio. Cheers all around. Virginia was closer than it was supposed to be. I got out my own computer to browse for a few more information-peanuts—which counties were late with the returns, what was happening in the Senate. Maps within maps. On the TV, Elizabeth Dole, with her poor stiff blurry face—and why has mutilation become part of the aging process for American women?—conceded defeat.

Obama was winning, to some extent. It was time to leave the party and go get the baby. He fell asleep in the cab, and I got back on the Internet at home. News began flooding in from the U.S., through instant messaging: Virginia was called for Obama. Fox was calling the race for Obama. I tried to find a video feed from Grant Park. CNN told me my version of Flash wasn't up to date. The Obama Web site asked me for a donation. McCain was conceding. Chinese TV again: Now CCTV International, the English channel, did have it. "...Opportunities to those who all who have the industry and will to seize it..."

Then the station cut away so that the anchor could ask a guest expert, in her BBC English, what this election might mean for China. The MSNBC player was working on my computer: "… to dine at the White House … " CCTV International threw it to a live stand-up from Arizona. The reporter was inside the Biltmore ballroom—"the place," he said, "where John McCain's election event was originally planned." The speech had been moved outside, but he was holding his post indoors, with McCain on giant screens behind him. "As I speak, you can hear this loud noise" from outside, he said.

What had CCTV International heard from voters? It was the economy.

"They're voting for change, they're not happy with how things are handled in the U.S.," the reporter said.

”This is not a surprise win for Barack Obama," he said.

On the MSNBC feed, John McCain's supporters were booing his attempts at graciousness. CCTV International went to a segment of interviews with American troops. Then a station break: the battle against SARS … the Chinese scientist who was the father of hybrid rice … the ubiquitous Liu Xiang, the record-breaking hurdler. A commercial promoted the rock formations of the Yiming Stone Forest--more impressive than the more famous Stone Forest of Yunnan.

The MSNBC folks vamped their way through lunchtime, waiting for Obama. CCTV International moved on to a financial-news program. The anchor was somebody I had met at a party. Obama appeared and gave his speech. Every now and then the image of his face would freeze, but his voice kept flowing.

Three hours later, in traffic, I saw a vendor with an armload of the Beijing Legal Evening News. Obama was on the front page. How much?

Fifty mao, my cab driver said. The vendor doubled the price: 1 RMB. I shoved the bill out the window and got the paper. Ao Ba Ma, the headline said. Meiguo Shouwei Heiren Zongtong. America's First Black President.

(To his credit, nowhere in the Haute Living piece does Mr. Boulud turn the phrase "Peking duck.")

Above is a YouTube clip of Mr. Boulud in the kitchen of Maison Boulud.

I have the honor of participating in a program at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs where we provide management training for senior government officials from Guangdong Province in China. Guangdong is an industrial province with about 80 million residents and a large number of guest workers, and is at the heart of China's massive effort to develop economically. During a recent discussion with my class, one of the students made the point that all nations that have developed an industrial base go through a period of intense pollution followed by the generation of sufficient wealth that permits a move to a cleaner style of development. This is of course true, although some argue that the United States, Europe and Japan simply exported their dirty industry to the developing world.

It seems to be the case that intense pollution is typical during the early stages of economic development. In the United States the air and water in many of our cities in the 1950's and 1960's was far worse than it is today. But this is the 21st century, and I think we are also starting to understand that in the long run you can't trade off environmental quality for economic growth. Long term growth requires that we sustain the quality of our environment. The people running the Olympic games know that without breathable air, the games could not take place. Billions of dollars of investment would have gone down the drain.

In the case of China, the problem of pollution from economic development is one of scale. The pace and extent of China's rapid development is unprecedented. The pollution loads are also unique. Since the 1980's the United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up the mistakes of the mid-twentieth century and to try to prevent those mistakes in the future. The bill we are paying now in the United States will eventually come due in China as well. However in China the bill may end up being much higher-- and some of the damage will be irreversible.

This leads to the issue of China's environmental quality: In July, thousands of Chinese worked to clear algae from the Yellow Sea for the sailing races. Although Chinese officials said the algal bloom was caused by rainfall and warmer waters, the sea is contaminated with untreated sewage and agricultural and industrial runoff. Air quality has been a visible and embarrassing issue, with at least one athlete skipping the Olympics out of fear of harm. At the start of the games, four United States cyclists apologized after arriving at the airport with masks on. Someone must have mentioned that they had inadvertently insulted their hosts. So much for international diplomacy....

In anticipation of the Olympics, the Chinese government invested over $20 billion to improve environmental quality in Beijing, and over the past year, officials reported that the air has been either "fair" or "good" 70 percent of the time. After watching the opening ceremonies it is easy to see how important this event is to China's government and its people. This is a national celebration of unprecedented proportions. As visible air pollution persisted in the weeks before the Olympics, China took additional measures to improve the air. Cars were only allowed on the road every other day, based on an even-odd license plate rule, and the city halted construction and temporarily closed factories. Air quality has improved, and the head of the International Olympic Committee has said that China has done "everything that is feasible and humanly possible to address this situation", that, "What they have done is extraordinary," and that there is "absolutely no danger" to the health of athletes participating in events shorter than one hour. Endurance events might be postponed if pollution is bad.

As a New Yorker, I wondered how our air compares to the air that our Olympic athletes are breathing in China. The air here is better than it once was, but still far from perfect. In New York City, from April 19th to August 1st of this year, New York City had 16 non-attainment days for ozone (roughly 15%). As of June 2nd, parts of New York City had persistently exceeded the national ambient air quality standards for particulates (PM2.5), ozone, and even, at least in some places, larger piece of soot known as particulate matter 10.

While the Chinese government believed that Beijing's air quality would be above World Health Organization standards during the Olympics, the day before the games, the British Broadcasting Company reported that particulate matter 10 registered at "191 micrograms per cubic metre. This far exceeds the World Health Organization target of 50 micrograms/cubic metre, and also exceeds the target for developing countries of 150 micrograms/cubic metre."

While assessing the presence of large particulates may not be the best way to compare the air in both cities, we do have data on the soot in both cities and can compare the two. Particulate matter size 10 (measured in micrograms per cubic meter) was recorded in New York City and Beijing on the first few days of the 2008 Olympics: On Friday, August 8: Beijing was 156 with New York City at 11.8; Saturday, August 9, Beijing was 110, New York, 12.1, Sunday August 10, Beijing was 278 and New York City, 19.0. You get the idea: The World Health Organization standard for these particulates is 50-New York always met the standard, Beijing never did.

It is clear that the organizers of this year's Summer Olympic Games understood that the success of Beijing's games was closely connected to the quality of the local environment. Cities around the world are learning that in addition to great restaurants, exciting night life and meaningful cultural opportunities, both residents and visitors expect cities to provide the air needed to breath.

I am grateful for the research assistance of Rachel Dannefer, Masters Student, Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

Are they? As of today, the old people seemed to be exactly where they've been all month: sitting in twos or threes every 50 yards or so along every roadside, all over the city, wearing white Yanjing Beer polo shirts and red armbands. Or manning the sidewalk volunteer information booths in the neighborhoods.

But all McGrath sees is an army of college students, smiling at him in their Olympic-volunteer polo shirts. This despite an omniscient eye--one that can see right into the soul of a nation:

Or perhaps because, unlike college students, middle-aged people already have jobs? Maybe someone could ask them, if any can be found to be asked. There might be some outside the Olympic Green somewhere?

Ms. Shen spoke English and wore yoga pants, a white T-shirt and flip-flops. (“I do yoga a lot,” she said.) Her hair was reddish and pulled back. Around her, the night was full of women in short-shorts, teetering heels, sparkly things; among the women were all the men looking for women.

Sex and da City opened in 2003, Ms. Shen said. She and about a dozen friends had been out at the World of Suzy Wong Club, and everyone agreed they might as well open a bar of their own. When they convened to discuss the idea again in the daytime, the group had dwindled to five. When it came time to talk about investing money, Ms. Shen said, it was down to four women.

That night, Ms. Shen said, she went home and watched HBO. And right there was a show—she had already been a fan—about “exactly four girls,” pursuing independence and glamour in the big city. Before Ms. Shen and her partners went to the bank, another one of them dropped out, but she had settled on the name. Replacing “the” with “da” is, by Chinese standards, a fairly respectful nod to intellectual-property rights.

“We have Charlotte, we have Carrie,” Ms. Shen said. They have Samantha, too, Ms. Shen added, but their Samantha won’t admit it. Which one is Ms. Shen? “Maybe Carrie,” she said.

Ms. Shen said she is looking forward to the Sex and the City movie. “Maybe my husband already bought the DVD,” she said.

Houhai is a Beijing phenomenon, a quiet area of shoreline devoured in less than a decade by a nightlife land rush. It now has the frantic, eagerly debauched air of a boardwalk during spring break—tinged by the interethnic May-December satisfaction of expats on the make. A vendor sold T-shirts with flickering graphic equalizers on them. Live heavy metal came out of an open bar front; a cover of “Country Roads” from another. Touts trolled the strip murmuring invitations to this or that “lady bar.” “Lady bar, lady bar.”

Ms. Shen was born in Chairman Mao’s Beijing, in Haidian District. “I never imagined that I could open a bar like this,” she said.

Sex and da City is a modest-size club, with a square floor plan and a square bar in the middle, with a two-story mural of Marilyn Monroe looming above the liquor bottles. A DJ booth was playing hip-hop, loudly. Marilyn’s face looks into a three-sided loft, where tables are 500 RMB ($72). The drink menu is long and includes an “Absolut Astronaut Shooter,” a “Sex and da City Absolut Cosmopolitan,” and an “Olympic Cocktail.” The last was orange-ish and fruity, and it came in a big martini glass with a cherry notched onto its rim.

On each side of the bar is a shiny metal pole, running up to the facing of the loft. Around 11 p.m., a young woman in a snug black dress and shiny boots past her knee climbed up on the bar and began dancing around and on the pole. The dancer had a cheery smile and wore square-cut bangs down past her eyebrows. She danced in a matter-of-fact style, wrapping it up by shinning up the pole, as if in gym class, and doing a back bend.

Another dancer, skinnier and in a blousy, shorter dress, took the next shift. Older Chinese men with peasant faces paused outside in the lane, goggling through the clear part of the glass door. Ms. Shen said she added the pole dancers in 2005. “Actually, there is a school, a pole dancers’ school, in Beijing,” she said. Occasionally, she said, the district police come by and tell them to make sure nobody does anything too provocative.

Inside, a Chinese couple in their 20s was having a drink at one of the tables. Jodi Xu, a reporter born in Shanghai, had met me at the club to help with interviews. The man told us that they had come to the club because of the pole dancers. It was the only pole dancing on the whole street, he said. The dancers used to be more sexy, and they had more moves, he said, but the police had made them cut down on the erotic dancing for the Olympics.

The DJ played “Let’s Get It Started,” and people whooped and began to dance. On top of the bar, the woman in the boots—now wearing a blue pleated skirt and a T-shirt reading “ALL GOOD IN THE HOOD”—kept moving at her previous calm pace.

Up in the loft, by the top of the stairs, the other dancer was slouched in a chair, wearing earbuds. She took them out to talk to us about Sex and da City. She came to Beijing from Shanxi Province two years ago, she said, and she had been an instructor at the city’s pole-dancing school. She dances 10 minutes a shift—she held up her index fingers to make a cross, the Chinese symbol for “10”—eight shifts a night, till 1 a.m. “I studied dancing since I was a child, so that’s why I like dancing,” she said. “But at the same time, I need to make money.” Living in Beijing, she said, created a lot of pressure. “If there’s no money, you can’t survive, and it’s hard to find a job.”

She confirmed that the police had asked them to dance less sexily, more low-key. She fiddled with a cigarette lighter in one hand and a shiny cell phone in the other as she talked. How old was she? Twenty-seven, she said. “Don’t ask about my age.”

Downstairs at the center of the bar, a Chinese woman in a dull-patterned dress had been sitting for a long time with her back to the door, talking to no one, stooped over a lowball glass. A bartender set a bottle of Corona beer, with a lime in the neck, beside her. Then he put fresh ice in a glass and poured the beer over it for her.

tscocca@observer.com

Resolving that issue in China requires wrestling with questions of being and reality—including, in my case, an argument with a uniformed officer of the Beijing Public Security Bureau about whether or not my pen (my pen, mind you) could be called a "pen."

It was not a particularly cooperative process. I arrived in Beijing in March with a slip of paper stapled inside my passport saying, "The holder of this visa is not allowed to engage in news report activities in China."

I had been carrying that slip back and forth from New York since 2004, through a dozen different tourist visas. To get a Chinese tourist visa, you have to tell the Chinese consulate what you do for a living. If what you do for a living is reporting or editing, you have to hand over a letter from your boss, on company letterhead, saying you won't do it.

So I handed over those letters, over and over again, each time requiring a trip out to the Chinese consulate on 12th Avenue, which is essentially in Weehawken. Some travelers get around the rule by writing on the application that they teach English or do consulting, something nonthreatening. Because I planned to get a journalist's visa someday, I stuck to the procedure. I was a tourist. Any research or writing I might happen to do would not rise to the level of "news report activities."

But this past December, I set out to become an official journalist, by China's definition. Americans, with the blog age in flower, are eager to debate who is or isn't a journalist: Who gets to use shield laws? Who gets to go to press conferences? Are there certain minimum standards of professionalism, epistemology, circulation? The presumption of freedom lasts till the grand jury comes calling, or till you try to get a press pass for a weekly newspaper to write about a Yankees game. Then, conflicting judgments come into play.

China has assigned those decisions to the government. I was about to say it had "centralized" those decisions, but total authority is not the same thing as central authority. Americans tend to picture China as being ruled from the top down, but the system is more a matter of interlaced, layered and competing bureaucracies. To cover the news in any particular city, for one example, reporters were traditionally required to get an invitation from local officials. No invitation, no right to report--in American-media terms, it's as if publicists had the force of law on their side.

Late last year, though, China announced that it would be suspending those travel restrictions on foreign journalists on Jan. 1, as part of a broad set of changes in advance of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The press-visa rules were to be loosened as well.

The timing was perfect: I wanted a visa to report on Beijing's Olympic preparations. I planned to spend as much time here as possible before the Games, watching the remaking—on a rapid schedule and a monumental scale—of an ancient capital into an international showpiece.

I explained all this to the consular press staff. They said they weren't sure if I could get a long-term visa or not. Though the new free-press rules were less than a month away, no one had explained the specifics to them yet. They told me to put together an application, describing the product and my journalistic credentials, and turn it in after New Years. I waited for January, submitted the papers, and waited some more. Eventually, the consulate reported back: I should apply directly to the Beijing Olympic committee. I faxed the paperwork to Beijing. The Olympic committee wrote back: I should apply to the consulate.

Throughout the run-up to the Olympics, protesters around the world have been denouncing the Chinese government's repression of journalists. This month, as the Olympic countdown reached the one-year mark, the Committee to Protect Journalists held a press conference and Reporters Without Borders unfurled a protest banner on Tiananmen Square, calling attention to the detention, harassment and other abuse that reporters regularly encounter here. The Reporters Without Borders contingent was rounded up by the cops and hustled to the airport, proving everyone's point.

But what happens when a journalist tries to comply with the Chinese authorities, instead? I submitted my application to the consulate again. Every week or so, I called in for an update. They had forwarded it to the Foreign Ministry, which would review it and refer it to the Olympic committee. The Olympic committee was reviewing it, and was preparing to refer it to the Foreign Ministry. The Foreign Ministry was ...

In March, against the consulate's advice—my journalist's visa was almost certainly going to be ready by next week, or the week after!—I put in for a tourist visa and flew to China. After another month of waiting, my faith in the liberalized visa process was eroding. Finally, I showed up in person at the Olympic media center, in a down-at-the-heel hotel south of the main Olympic construction site. There, an official outlined the problem: The Olympic committee had nothing against my visa request. But new rules or none, the Olympics office was only authorized to grant short-term visas. Long-term visas were the responsibility of the Foreign Ministry. And the Foreign Ministry did not see itself as responsible for Olympics reporters. So my request was being volleyed back and forth indefinitely.

What if, I asked, the Olympic committee were to offer its longest visa, for 90 days, and then follow it up with another 90, and so on? Could I get five or six of those in a row, till the Olympics were over? Certainly, the official said—first, you need give us an application.

I pointed out that I had already done that at least twice. After some searching, the Olympic committee found one of the applications. It was all set, they said, and it was off to the Foreign Ministry for approval. I called the Foreign Ministry to see if it had arrived. A friendly officer, speaking very good English, told me that it had. But, he admonished, I really should have applied in New York instead. Now, he said, the ministry needed to figure out which department ought to handle it.

But the next day, the officer told me he had "good news"—the visa was approved. I needed only to go pick it up from the Public Security Bureau.

The Public Security Bureau, or Gong An, is the police department, among other things. Its visa office is a newish building with an open stairwell and polished stone surfaces, not far from my apartment. It's a quick cab ride, except that taxis are forbidden to drop off or pick up passengers on the block facing the Public Security building.

The visa department was on the second floor, in a room ringed with stations behind counters—like a giant, well-kept bank branch, staffed by uniformed police officers. I had been told to report to Window 19. The officer there asked where my documents were. Having nothing but the passport, I handed it over. She studied my visa. "This is not a journalist's visa," she said. I explained that was why I was there, because I was changing it to a journalist's visa. She asked me to wait while she summoned a case officer to deal with me.

While we waited, the officer at Window 19 said she had another question. What was the difference, she asked, between a "journalist" and a "correspondent"? Well, I said, a correspondent is a journalist, but specifically one who works somewhere other than where his or her employer is based. Satisfied, she turned back to her work.

The case officer arrived. Had I filled out a form? (What form?) Did I have an I.D. photo? (A what now?) Photos were in the back, he said. And I could get the form at Window 38, across the room. Window 38, when I got there, was empty. I turned back to Window 19. In the half-minute it had taken to go back and forth, both officers had vanished, replaced by a different set of people in the same uniforms. Everything else was as before.

I turned around again, to Window 38. To one side was an unattended stack of application forms. Every seat was taken, so I crouched down at the counter, took out a pen, and began to fill one out.

I was halfway through when the case officer reappeared, at Window 38, looking down at me. Did I have a residence registration form? he asked. I did not. If I lived in a hotel, he said, the front desk could provide one. I live in an apartment. Then the local police would have to issue me one, he said, and I would have to come back with it.

Also, he said, you can't fill out the form with that pen. I was baffled. He pointed to the instructions at the top of the form, which said, in English, to use "blue or black ink pen." My pen was black, a medium-point Paper-Mate, the pen I always carry. The ink is black; the plastic casing is black. I held it up. See, I said, it's a black ink pen.

That's not a black ink pen, the officer said.

I handed it over. He took it and made a few test scribbles, black marks on the paper. He handed the pen back dismissively.

This is not a black ink pen, he said. This is a ballpoint.

I was defeated. Back in my own neighborhood, I stopped by the corner store and bought a roller ball—which does count, in the Chinese hierarchy of pens, as an "ink pen." And I went to the local police station to report myself as an unregistered foreigner.

Did I have a copy of my lease? the neighborhood policeman asked. I did not; the lease was a word-of-mouth extension of one signed by my wife three years earlier. Without the lease, he said, I couldn't register myself. I was not allowed to turn myself in.

Luckily, though, we were almost due for a new lease anyway. The landlord worked one up on paper, with my name on it, and I delivered it to the neighborhood police station. The neighborhood cops issued me a residence certificate, which I delivered to the visa office. I filled out the form, in black roller-ball, and attached an I.D. photo, and handed in the papers at a now-staffed Window 38. For the next 90 days, I would be a legal journalist.

So I went out and interviewed people, visited places, attended official press conferences. No one ever asked to see my visa. I began to feel more or less like a reporter in America: an unimportant functionary, watching events from the margins.

Then, after two months, I got a phone call from the Olympic press center. Would I be interested, they asked, in getting a driver's license? It was, as far as I could remember, the first time the media department had offered me something without my asking. Till that moment, I hadn't really planned on getting a license. Beijing's driver's exam involves a grueling and pointless written test; the expat tales about it deal with either brutal cram sessions or well-placed bribes. Since cars are expensive here and taxis are cheap, it didn't seem worth the bother. But the Olympic representative told me I could just bring in my American driver's license and fill out a form. It was a new example of the campaign to make life easier for foreign journalists. I could drop in—by now, the press center had left the hotel for a space in a gleaming municipal office tower, with a wavelike glass roof over a full-height atrium—any time that week.

Maybe I did want a driver's license. I pictured myself renting a car and taking it for a spin out the Liangma Bridge Road, to the neon-festooned drive-in theater I kept seeing out my taxi windows.

I told them I would sign up, then let a few days go by. The press center called again and repeated the invitation: easy license, no hassle, come by this week. They also called to tell me that there would be a press conference—Sunday, 9 a.m.—to announce the opening of a new one-stop media service center. If I applied before then, they said, I could pick up my license at the service center that morning. I would be coming to the press conference, right?

Slowly, it dawned on me that there might something behind the solicitousness. I told them I probably couldn't drop off the application till Saturday afternoon. Would that be OK? The office would be open, they said.

I arrived late on Saturday, in heavy rain, to find four staffers from the Olympics and the Gong An waiting. I gave them my New York license and got to work on the application. There was a space for the duration of the license--that, they explained, would be the same as the expiration period of my visa. When I got my next 90-day visa, I could sign up for a new license to go with it.

Also, it needed a photo—did I have a photo? I dug out some spare I.D. photos left over from the Public Security Bureau's visa office. The Public Security Bureau in charge of the driver's license examined the pictures. They were the wrong size, she said.

There was a moment of mutual dismay. The one-stop media service center did not have a photo department. But! A market in the neighborhood could take the photos for me. Out the door, across Chaoyangmen Bridge, on the left. One of them wrote the size and background color specifications out for me.

Had I been considering only my own interests at the moment, I would have hailed a cab and gone home. But there were greater historical issues at stake. I was the Western media; China was trying to do me a favor. I set off through the downpour.

The market, I discovered, was a 10-minute hike away. With soggy feet, I tramped up and down the escalators, looking for the photo department. I found it in the grocery section-—a tripod, rate sheet, and foamboard backdrop set up by the checkout-line exits. I hunted up a clerk, sat for the pictures, collected them, and sloshed back.

As I handed the photos over, I tested my hunch. How many other journalists would be picking up their licenses the next day? "You are the very first one," the lead media-center staffer said. "So don't be late!"

The next day's program began in the press-conference hall on the top floor, under the swooping glass roof. A banner at the front read "Launch of One-Stop Service for Media during / the Beijing Olympic Games and the Preparatory Period." A snippet of "The Greatest Love of All" played, then went away.

There were more than 100 people in the audience. About half were from the press, mostly Chinese. The rest represented the agencies, bureaus, and companies taking part in the service center—29 in all, including the Public Security Bureau; the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television; the Bank of China; the State Administration of Foreign Exchange; the People's Liberation Army.

Even by the standards of press conferences, Chinese press conferences tend to be dry affairs. I hunkered down in my seat and tried to take notes, as a series of officials took the microphone and hailed the service center as a "brand-new innovation" and an "unprecedented approach." Invoking the new press-access rules, one declared the center "a solid step forward to implement these regulations and show that we really honor our promise to the media." China, another said, will "bear in mind the principle of treating the media kindly." With a flourish, the final speaker declared that "one-stop service for the media ... now starts!"

The crowd was invited, offhandedly, to stop by the fifth floor on the way out and see the center at work.

Whatever was in store for me was about to happen. Rather than waiting for the elevator, I took the stairs. As I hit the fifth floor, my cell phone was ringing: an Olympics official, checking to make sure I was there.

Staffers intercepted me in the crowded hallway and guided me toward the room where I'd been the day before. I went in like a man being escorted into his surprise 50th birthday party.

At the far end, next to the driver's-license station, a mass of photographers and television camera crews was waiting. Someone had put flower arrangements on the table. Behind the flowers was a smiling Public Security Bureau officer, a tiny woman in uniform. My completed application form was presented with a flourish and remarks to me in Mandarin, untranslated. Flashbulbs went off. The Gong An officer held up an I.D. card with my picture on it, in loose plastic, then gave it a ceremonial pass through a laminator, to the rattle of shutters going off. She handed it to me, still warm.

Officials closed in, shaking my hand, with cameras popping all the while. The card had a made-up Chinese name for me—"Tuo Ma Si" in characters—and an expiration date 27 days in the future. It also said, in the fine print, that if the police stopped me, I would need to show them an official Chinese translation of my American license. So, technically speaking, the license did not allow me to drive. Could I get the translation at the one-stop service center? I could not.

The photographers asked to see my license, and began holding it up in the foreground as they kept snapping away. A man on the far side of the table began asking me questions: How long had I been in Beijing? What sites had I seen? Had I eaten Beijing duck? When my answers flagged, he confided, sotto voce, that he was just trying to keep me talking and smiling for the cameras. This is kind of alarming, I told him, grinning. Yes, isn't it? he smiled back. A photographer hollered something. She says, the man said, if you smile bigger, you'll be on the front page. Interview time. Going in, I had resolved not to be a stooge. My talking points would be strictly truthful: that I was glad to see this new emphasis on coordination and convenience, and that I hoped they would follow it up by making it easier to get a long-term visa. As far as I could tell, I repeated the message to everyone I saw. I did an interview for Beijing Television, then one for China Central Television.

In the English translation of the official Olympic Committee news story about the event, I am described as the "most elated" of the journalists at the event. "I am extremely happy," the story quoted me as saying. "I know that traffic management in Beijing is very strict; I'd never have imagined that I'd get my driver's license so quickly. Now I can drive by myself, which will make interviewing a lot more convenient."

The last bit struck me as especially implausible. But who needed to know what I'd said? I was a representative of progress. And I was a picturesque one. Owing to a previous bad experience with the language barrier and thinning shears, I had not had a haircut since leaving New York. People began to stop me and tell me they'd seen me on TV or on the front page of the Beijing Evening News—a teacher at my Chinese school, a nurse at the hospital, the man who sells phone cards outside the corner store. A sports newspaper invited me to write an essay about my observations of Beijing, for 1 RMB a word. Another TV station, Phoenix Television, asked if I would sit for a follow-up interview. I agreed. By text message, they sent an additional request: Could I drive my car to the interview?

With regret, I told them I did not yet have a car. I went to the interview by taxi.

You can learn a lot wandering around a foreign country in the first person. Mr. Friedman does it all the time. He looks around and talks to somebody and learns something important. Now I was the one in a cab in a foreign country. Conversations with cab drivers are the sort of things that lead Mr. Friedman to larger truths about globalization and the world we live in today.

This was Nov. 12. I had asked the driver to go to Yuexiu Market, and he had gone to Yaxiu Market. I’d even writaten out “Yuexiu” in Chinese characters. So I told the cabbie, “No, this is Yaxiu; I want to go to Yuexiu, on Chaoyangmen.” For me, this was a fairly in-depth cabbie exchange.

The bookstore was the Bookworm, a foreigner-run place that offers Wi-Fi and crostini, on the upper floor of a building near Workers’ Stadium. The side room had been set up for a lecture, with rows of chairs, and every chair was taken—either by a person or by a bag or coat in lieu of a person. There was a television in the main room and another in the back room, for overflow spectators.

Mr. Friedman was not there. It was 10 minutes after 5 p.m. A Bookworm staffer, looking slightly dazed, explained that the talk was not scheduled till 7:30. The roomful of people had showed up more than two hours early.

Two hours was enough time to go get dinner. Outside, murk had fallen on the city. It has been a strangely clear and bright fall in Beijing, which is usually choked with thick, impenetrable pollution, like Industrial Revolution–era London. The normal tailpipe smell of the air had been replaced by crisp breezes. But there had been a golden tinge in the air all afternoon, and toward sundown, the gold had deepened to the old familiar mud-and-cement color.

What to eat, while waiting for a globalization lecture? There was a Pakistani-Xinjiang restaurant up the street, on the top floor of yet another multi-level market. A subcontinental dance-music cover of “Eye of the Tiger” played on the sound system.

By the time I got back to the Bookworm, there were two or three dozen people lined up outside at the foot of the stairs, and employees were announcing that no one else could come up. “I feel like this is a rock concert,” one of them said. “I want it to be a rock concert, actually.”

The crowd did not disperse. Some were carrying copies of Thomas Friedman books. The staffers guarding the stairs asked for a look at a book. “Does it have a picture, so we know who not to bar?” one asked.

The lack of a Thomas Friedman lecture seemed possibly more informative than the lecture itself would be. But I got in, because I write for a newspaper. Writing for a newspaper means you get a somewhat different set of experiences than other people get.

The bookstore was packed and steaming. All the rooms, the lecture room and the TV rooms, were full of people. It was so crowded that most people didn’t see Mr. Friedman come in—a small, roundish figure escorted by the Bookworm’s owner, a woman much taller than him. He wore black trousers and a dark sweater with a zipper at the neck.

With a smile, Mr. Friedman perched on a tall stool. He had the genial assurance of a children’s television host. “If you get a small enough room, you can feel really important,” he told the audience.

His talk, he said, would be an update on his thinking about his latest book, The World Is Flat, which he said is now out in its 2.0 version. His new thoughts will be incorporated into a 3.0 version. “The whole subject is alive,” he said.

Mr. Friedman explained how he had come to write the book. It had begun in 2004, he said, with a planned documentary project, part of The Times’ involvement with the Discovery Channel, in which he was going to go to call centers around the world and report on the people who “spend their days imitating Americans.” Then outsourcing became an issue in the American Presidential campaign, and he decided to focus on Bangalore, India, and report on the “other side of outsourcing.” After 11 days of interviews, he ended up being told that the global economic playing field was being leveled—which, in a much-recounted eureka moment, he concluded meant that he should write a book called The World Is Flat.

Losing the call-centers story seemed like a shame. But Mr. Friedman’s mind moves forcefully from the specific to the general; the general makes for best-sellers. Perhaps someone else can still do the call centers.

Mr. Friedman moved on to the subject of what he called “Ten Days That Flattened the World.” He was speaking without notes, playing on names and numbers, repeating his points. The first world-flattening day was 11/9, he said. Not 9/11. No, 11/9 was, by “Kabbalistic accident,” the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Someone moved around, breaking his train of thought. He went back to 11/9 and 9/11. A young woman came in, carrying shopping bags, distracting him again. “Everybody settled?” Mr. Friedman asked. “Anybody want to stand up and say something?” 11/9. A cell phone rang.

The awkwardness passed, and Mr. Friedman settled back into his timeline of global techno-unification and leveling: Microsoft Windows, the Netscape I.P.O., the fiber-optic infrastructure buildout. The “workflow revolution.” Mr. Friedman speaks with his hands and arms, sometimes his whole body. He pantomimed an old-fashioned worker hand-carrying a piece of paper from one place to another. He pulled and stretched imaginary objects in the air, as if he were in one of those notebook-computer commercials like Jay-Z or Shaun “The Flying Tomato” Wright. He typed on an invisible keyboard. He extended his index fingers, then brought the tips together, touching: interoperability.

The language was flourishy to match: “Beijing, Bangalore and Bethesda” … “from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China.” Metaphors flourished themselves into trouble. “What these steroids do is turbocharge all these new forms of collaboration,” Mr. Friedman said. Also: “Mother Nature always bats last.”

“Whatever can be done will be done,” Mr. Friedman said. “Will it be done by you or to you?” He repeated the question. By you or to you?

He told a story about going to Hungary and being driven around. His driver had asked him—“Mister Tom, Mister Tom”—to refer friends to him, if they visited Hungary. The driver, Mr. Friedman said, had given him the U.R.L. of his Web site: a hired Hungarian driver with his own Internet presence. Imagine!

More metaphor: Mr. Friedman compared the C.E.O.’s who understand the scope of the ongoing transformation to the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They know the secret. “None of our political leaders were talkin’ about it,” Mr. Friedman said. Mr. Friedman was with the pods.

“The world. Is. Flat,” he said.

In the question-and-answer period, he was asked about the midterm elections. The 2008 election, he said, is “going to be about China.” What about Hillary vs. Obama? “I think Obama is a really, really serious candidate, and if you asked me to bet today, I’d bet he’d be the Democratic nominee.” Mr. Friedman talked about the liabilities that Al Gore and John Kerry had brought, and the baggage that Hillary Clinton has. “We’re looking for a uniter, not a divider,” he said.

“But I don’t do domestic politics,” he said.

A tall young man in a Brandeis T-shirt raised the issue of Mr. Friedman’s personal wealth, and whether that might shape his views of globalization. “If George Soros were here, giving a speech from the far left, would you have asked him that question?” Mr. Friedman asked.

“Um, sure,” the questioner said.

But Mr. Friedman had set off, defending himself from his unseen enemies. He stands accused, he said, of being “a prophet of globalization” or “the Panglossian avatar of globalization.” Not so. “I didn’t do this,” Mr. Friedman said. “I didn’t start this. I just wrote about it.”

On it went, prosecution and defense, in one man. He has been called a “spokesman for global capitalism.” A “shill.”

“It’s stupid,” Mr. Friedman said.

His foes have their facts and figures, criticizing him for not weighing the costs of globalization. “Thank you very much for those statistics,” Mr. Friedman said, apostrophically. “They’re all from my book.”

There is, in fact, a Friedmanian dialectic. It only appears to go: thesis—antithesis—thesis! Thomas Friedman appreciates the dark side.

Earlier, for instance, the subject of the environment had come up. Mr. Friedman had said that he thought he knew how his next column, the Nov. 15 column, would begin. He would talk about being in Beijing, he said. Every time he comes here, he said, “people here speak with greater ease, and breathe with greater difficulty.” He described landing that day at the Beijing airport and hearing the stewardess announce that the weather outside was “clear.”

“And you could not see the terminal,” Mr. Friedman said. The crowd laughed knowingly. Old Beijing joke. But couldn’t you?

And the next day dawned crystalline and brilliant, without a trace of smog. That night, the sky over Beijing was strewn with stars.

The New York Press, the sometimes-feisty alt weekly that’s nipped at the heels of The Village Voice since 1988, has been quietly put on the market.

The North Jersey Media Group was one company that had been approached.

“They did speak with one of our managers,” said Jennifer Borg, the general counsel for the North Jersey Media Group. “The question was, ‘Do you want to buy it?’”

That media company owns daily newspapers such as The Record and more than 40 community publications. They have their own alternative newspaper: the aptly titled Exit.

Ms. Borg had “heard rumors for more than a year” that the Press was on the market. There are no negotiations currently under way between her company and the Press, she said.

David Unger, founder and managing partner of Avalon Equity Partners—which purchased the Press in 2002, and owns the gay weekly chain that includes The New York Blade—declined to comment.

Since 2002, the top of the Press’ masthead has been in frequent flux.

In March 2005, editor in chief Jeff Koyen resigned after battling the owners over a cover story mocking the death of Pope John Paul II. Earlier this year, four staffers—including editor Harry Siegel—resigned due to a story about the Danish cartoon scandal, which would have included republishing the controversial depictions of Muhammad.

Current editor in chief Adario Strange declined to comment.

—Michael Calderone

“I have to plot out what I’m going to do without thinking about what’s going to happen next at the L.A. Times,” said Dean Baquet, reached by phone on Nov. 13, the day that former Chicago Tribune managing editor James O’Shea took Mr. Baquet’s old job as editor of the Los Angeles Times.

He is not, he said, thinking about who will buy the Times. Mr. Baquet said that published reports that Times managing editor Leo Wolinsky had been discussing the idea with billionaire and art collector Eli Broad “were exaggerated.”

Several months before Mr. Baquet and ousted Times publisher Jeffrey Johnson took their fateful stand against the Tribune Company suits in Chicago, Mr. Broad had casually mentioned the idea of buying the newspaper over a luncheon.

“We both just looked at him, sort of smiled, and moved on,” said Mr. Baquet.

“I don’t think anybody knows what’s going to happen,” said Mr. Baquet. “If you play it out, there are a million possibilities.”

“Mainly, I’m not going to think about anything,” Mr. Baquet continued. “I have been working full time for newspapers since I was about 20. I woke up this morning not in the employ of a newspaper.”

Mr. Baquet, who had picked up his old paper that morning, said it looked “terrific,” but that it was difficult for him to read.

According to Mr. Baquet, the paper is in good hands with Mr. O’Shea. By his account, Mr. Baquet encouraged Mr. O’Shea to accept the position, despite the less-than-ideal circumstances. “He’s not some bean-counter,” said Mr. Baquet. “He’s a very fine journalist.”

“Everybody who goes to the L.A. Times from Chicago falls in love with the place,” he said. “I think he will, too.”

And how will Mr. Baquet pass his time?

There have already been offers, he said, although he thought that some were “probably just being polite.” He declined to speculate on whether he would return to The New York Times, or whether he would leave Los Angeles.

“I haven’t gotten as far with anyone,” he said. “But I have to decide sometime soon what to do with myself.”

--M.C.

John Tierney’s final New York Times Op-Ed column ran on Nov. 14. Now he will make another transition--to blogger.

In January 2007, Mr. Tierney will take on columnist and blog duties in the Science Times section.

“I’d been thinking for a while that I’d like to do something different--a longer column, less often,” said Mr. Tierney on Nov. 14. “I love the Op-Ed thing, but the twice-a-week pace is tough.”

A memo was sent out on the morning of Mr. Tierney’s final column. “Plans are in the works to give Science Times more snap and crackle, a project that will start with a double-barreled blast” from Mr. Tierney and fellow columnist Natalie Angier.

Mr. Tierney was looking forward to having more science in his life. “I tend to be a contrarian,” said Mr. Tierney. “And to be a contrarian, you have to do a lot of research to debunk the conventional wisdom. It’s driven less by people’s political preferences and more by data.”

Mr. Tierney had been a preferred candidate of publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. for several years before he was appointed to the Op-Ed page, according to a source familiar with the publisher’s thinking. The libertarian writer was viewed as a possible replacement for William Safire before David Brooks joined the paper, said a source.

So will a politically conservative columnist fill the void?

“We want our opinion page to be as diverse as it can be,” said deputy editorial-page editor Andrew Rosenthal.

“If you look at our Op-Eds, my impression is that more of them disagree with the editorials than agree with them,” he said.

In January 2007, Mr. Rosenthal will take over as editorial-page editor. Gail Collins, the current editor, will then go on book leave, and will return to the Op-Ed page as a columnist in July.

Would Mr. Tierney’s slot be given to Ms. Collins?

“There is no such space,” said Mr. Rosenthal. “There are no ‘slots’ on our Op-Ed page. We’ve had seven columnists. We’ve had six columnists …. I don’t view our columnists as being pegs and holes to fill. They are distinctive.”

Some holes and pegs will assemble differently next year, however, as the newspaper itself changes trim size.

“The editorial space, it turns out, is in a slightly bigger type size,” said Mr. Rosenthal. He said that reducing the type size is one of many possibilities for the page. But he added: “I don’t want readers to think I’m going to make it like the phone book.”

Mr. Rosenthal also said that he plans to make more of the Times Web site when he takes over. Perhaps he will run into Mr. Tierney on the Internet.

--M.C.