Unlike the ill-fated salons proposed by The Washington Post in 2009, lobbyists can’t buy a seat at these off-the-record dinners; The Atlantic picked up the tab. The aim of the series, which may move to Los Angeles, Chicago, Silicon Valley, or Washington, D.C., depending on the cover story’s content, appears more earnest.

“This developed as an extension of The Atlantic’s mission from its outset, to be a proponent of the American idea,” publisher Jay Lauf told Off The Record. “We’re trying to put our money where our mouth is, raising controversial questions and fostering conversations.”

Like a comments section, but better dressed.

Atlantic editor James Bennet and James Fallows, author of the March’s cover story, “Obama, Explained,” broke bread with their competitors from New York’s print political media, including The New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann, New York’s John Heilemann, and Time’s Mark Halperin.

They were joined by Hollywood types Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky and actor Alec Baldwin; captains of industry like Mercedez Benz USA CEO Stephen Cannon and Eagle Capital managing director Boykin Curry; and the category-defying Arianna Huffington, who could only stay for cocktails.

“Some of the people we invite may change the way we look at those cover stories going forward on the web, or they may have more ideas on those cover stories that may be useful to the national dialogue,” Mr. Lauf explained.

Whom did Mr. Lauf look forward to exchanging American ideas with?

“I follow Alec Baldwin on Twitter,” Mr. Lauf said, “So he’s someone I think might always say something interesting.”

On Sunday, June 6, CNN aired an interview with James Fallows in which the writer talked on camera about his recent story in The Atlantic, which looked at Google's impact on the news business. Typically, such stories are full of gloom, but this one was hopeful. Having contributed to the many woes of the newspaper business, Mr. Fallows wrote, the engineers at Google were now working on ways to create a new business model to preserve serious journalism in the digital age, advocating "continuous experimentation-learning what does work by seeing all the things that don't."

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During the discussion with CNN's Howard Kurtz, Mr. Fallows mentioned the work of a media theorist whose maxim "nothing will work, but everything might" provided the theoretical framework embraced by the Google empiricists. Traditionally, there has been a place in American public life where you go to find visionaries happy to tout the social benefits of technological advances-namely, Silicon Valley. But Mr. Fallows was referring to the work of an N.Y.U. professor named Clay Shirky.

A few days earlier, Mr. Shirky sat in his office at N.Y.U.'s Interactive Telecommunications Program, on the fourth floor of a building overlooking Broadway, and acknowledged that people don't typically think of New York as a fountain of gushing techno-optimism-but that, perhaps, they should. "I've always been in communities of cultures that make things-artists, theater people, Internet entrepreneurs," said Mr. Shirky, a boyish, bald 46. "No matter now jaded or cynical someone's external demeanor, if you're in a group of people who make things, you're in a group of optimists."

In the hallway outside Mr. Shirky's office, a group of students were assembling a tent. A futuristic light projection that looked like a centipede danced across the floor. On the wall, there was a poster for a student project involving a "sound-walk" across the Brooklyn Bridge that would include video from the perspective of the student's feet.

"During the '90s, I spent countless hours trekking down to Wall Street because the bankers wanted to have a meeting about how do we make New York more like Silicon Valley," Mr. Shirky said. "My answer was always the same. You don't. What you could do is make New York a good place to start a business. The people who move here-they are some driven motherfuckers. They will figure it out."

Some 25 years after first moving to New York himself with an undergraduate degree in fine arts from Yale University and the hope of making it in theater design, Mr. Shirky has emerged, somewhat improbably, as the leading voice of New York's new school of technological pragmatism.

On June 10, Penguin Press will publish his latest book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. It's a wide-ranging essay about how the emerging forms of the Internet will ultimately provide a net benefit for society, in part by helping to free us all from our decades-long habit of over-medicating with television.

People have described Mr. Shirky as a cyber-utopian, but he rejects the term. He said that his greatest philosophical influence is the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty. "It's not that the technology is natively good," Mr. Shirky said. "But rather that it gives society the raw material we need to do new, interesting things."

IN THE EARLY '90s, Mr. Shirky made good use of his own cognitive surplus. At the time, he was running an experimental theater group in New York, which staged nonfiction documents (the conversation among air traffic controllers during a plane crash; Ed Meese's pornography report, etc.). One day, Mr. Shirky's mom, a research librarian in Columbia, Mo., where Mr. Shirky grew up, told him about something she was learning about in her library class. It was called the Internet. Mr. Shirky was hooked. Instead of returning to Yale, where he had been accepted into the graduate drama school to study lighting design, he studied programming at night at home online with "a bunch of cranky Unix systems administers who worked at banks."

"I would get home from the theater at 11 p.m. and stay on the Internet until 4," he said. "I thought either I could call myself an addict and get myself to quit. Or I could try and make it my job."

Eventually, Mr. Shirky entered New York's emerging world of interactive design.  "A lot of the people who started the interactive industry in New York came from theater, in part because you have a lot of time on your hands between jobs and, in part, because things you don't understand don't scare you," said Mr. Shirky. "Theater just gets you used to the idea that I have no idea how this is going to go, but let's try it and see what happens."

On the side, Mr. Shirky wrote for various publications about the emerging culture of the Internet, plus a series of technical books for hobbyist publisher Ziff Davis (sample title: The Internet by E-mail). He said he has always been a Web optimist; until recently, he added, this was like being a member of the Harlem Globetrotters. The opposition showed up, but it was mostly an exhibition game. "They weren't really theorists," said Mr. Shirky. "The entire argument was really between people who loved the Internet and people who didn't understand it."

These days, there's much more competition from the naysayers. "What's happened in the last five years is that people who use the Internet and understand it quite well on some axis, whether engineering or social, are nevertheless operating as pessimists," said Mr. Shirky.

In particular, Mr. Shirky has recently found himself mulling over the computer scientist Jaron Lanier's book, You Are Not a Gadget, in which Mr. Lanier criticizes the Internet's propensity for groupthink, shoddy group collaboration and "digital Maoism"; and technology journalist Nicholas Carr's just-published book The Shallows, which argues that as the Internet replaces print, the new medium is rewiring our brains and wrecking our ability to focus deeply.

"What's interesting to me is that I'm reading those books and nodding my head right up until the moment comes for the authors to say, 'Here's what we ought to do about it,'" said Mr. Shirky. "The stuff that Nick says is wrong with the Internet is wrong with the Internet. The distraction is, I think, the biggest problem. But what's interesting about The Shallows is that it doesn't actually propose what to do about it." ("My interest is description, not prescription," retorted Mr. Carr in an email.)

Part of the problem, said Mr. Shirky, is that Mr. Carr is comparing the 500-year-old print culture with an Internet culture that has existed for less than a quarter-century. "The old system has all these robust, well-worked-out institutions," said Mr. Shirky. "The new system, we just got here. He assumes that the new system won't improve."

Mr. Shirky thinks it will. The key, he believes, is to diagnose problems as they arise, and then use trial-and-error experimentation to build up a new set of institutions and cultural habits that will address the Internet's deficiencies while maximizing its freedoms. Even the rise of the insightful Internet pessimists, in Mr. Shirky's eyes, is a good thing, because they are increasingly skilled at calling attention to the most pressing problems with digital culture. "Funnily enough, it may be the pessimists who help us make more progress on the big issues, like anonymity and distractedness," he said. "In part because they have rhetorical clarity."

In the end, however, it will be the pragmatic optimists, Mr. Shirky believes, who will end up fixing those problems, most likely through a gradual and prolonged accumulation of small breakthroughs, solutions and optimizations.

SINCE THE FALL of 2001, Mr. Shirky has worked as an associate teacher at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), part of the school's Tisch School of the Arts. Founded in the 1970s, the program has grown into a lab of digital experimentation where teams of students endlessly tinker with new combinations of art and programming and social interactivity.

Over the years, Mr. Shirky has developed a seminar called Social Facts, whose syllabus progresses from sociological dilemmas facing groups irrespective of technology (tragedy of the commons, prisoner's dilemma, etc.) to the specific challenges facing groups online. By the end of the class, students are asked to think like designers-if you wanted to change an existing space, or create a new space, what would you do? Mr. Shirky also teaches a production class in which students develop technology projects in partnership with UNICEF. "If you could get into his class, you took it," said Dennis Crowley, the co-founder of Foursquare, who graduated from ITP in 2004. "You sit in his class for an hour, and you feel like a superstar, like you can understand things in a much clearer way."

Mr. Crowley described Mr. Shirky as the program's in-house theorist-the guy who students turn to in order to get a broader perspective on what they're doing and why it's important. In the fall of 2003, Mr. Shirky served as the informal adviser for an independent study taken by Mr. Crowley and one of his fellow students, Alex Rainert, who two years later sold their social networking software company, Dodgeball, to Google. In a program like ITP, said Mr. Crowley, you spend a lot of time engrossed in the minutiae of projects-learning how to write code, how to solder. "He's very good at widening the scope," said Mr. Crowley.

"I don't think we're throwing off the old print culture, and now we'll live in some kind of pure, sacred fusing with human nature as it always really was," said Mr. Shirky. "The source of my optimism is really that young people will find things to do with the medium that will create the kinds of institutions we need around something like the Web, rather than around something like print."

In March of 2009, Mr. Shirky wrote an essay on his personal blog about the root causes that are currently ravaging the newspaper business; it quickly became a must-read among journalists throughout the city. Unlike most pro-Internet media theorists, Mr. Shirky can talk extensively about the problems facing professional journalism without sounding like a scold. It's also possible to listen to him without that nagging suspicion that his real motivation is to selfishly milk old-media companies with a bunch of vapid ideas that will only make things worse.

On May 26, Mr. Shirky spoke at a private event for staff members of The New York Times, hosted by the paper's in-house R&D chief, Michael Zimbalist.

David Carr, the paper's media columnist, was impressed with Mr. Shirky's narrative synthesis. "He storytells in ways that people who are listening to him don't notice that the story ends with their obsolescence," said Mr. Carr. "They're sort of lulled to sleep by the music of his voice and his presentation. He just sort of gently mentions at the end the part about, 'And then you'll all be turned to red mist.'"

Mr. Carr said that these days if he had a half-hour or so to listen to anybody talk about the media business, Mr. Shirky would be at the top of the list. "He's an academic in the clinical sense," said Mr. Carr. "You just can't get to the end of what he knows or what he's interested in."

For the past decade, Mr. Shirky has been in a program for artists and techies, not for journalists. That may soon change. In the fall, he will delve into the journalism-business-model quandary as a visiting lecturer at Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. "The thing that I'm interested in is the ways in which journalism can function more like an ecosystem," said Mr. Shirky. "Which is to say that instead of having a whole bunch of institutions that are doing the full end-to-end production of news, that we end up with a bunch of shared resources, the way ProPublica works."

And when he returns to New York in 2011, for the first time, Mr. Shirky will begin working with N.Y.U.'s journalism department (the details of the arrangement have yet to be finalized).

"My interest in the last couple of years has turned especially to the production of nonfiction media, whether it's long-form journalism or investigative journalism," Mr. Shirky said. "It's no fun to just be the guy diagnosing the problem."

fgillette@observer.com

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From the very start of his column last year, Mr. Kristol drew criticism from writers like The Atlantic's James Fallows, who wrote of Mr. Kristol's debut on January 7th, 2008:

More recently, The New Yorker's George Packer wrote on November 17th, 2008:

That same month, Mr. Kristol told The Observer that writing for The Times, "I've had zero problems, issues … It's been low drama. Despite all the dramatics in the blogosphere, it's been a very undramatic experience for me."

His first entry, which features an endearingly retro Public Enemy reference as its title, begins with the self-effacing words, "This is almost certainly a mistake." Well, it can't be as big a mistake as championing the invasion of Iraq relying (according to Harper's Ken Silverstein), "heavily on administration sources and war hawks (and in at least one crucial case, a fabricator)."

In March, Goldberg offered a mea culpa on Slate:

For the most part, his inaugural post is long on jokes ("I joined the Atlantic last year, from the New Yorker. Before writing for the New Yorker, I wrote for the New York Times Magazine, and before that, for New York Magazine. I have nearly run out of magazines. I will undoubtedly be ending my career at Cat Fancy...") and backslaps to colleagues like Andrew Sullivan ("himself, responsible for twenty-seven percent of all blog entries ever posted on the Worldwide Web") and James Fallows ("my clear role model... He also seems to be blessedly free of the urge to over-post").

His Atlantic blog is not Mr. Goldberg's first foray into the Web. He has long participated in Slate's TV Club discussions of The Sopranos and The Wire and he is a co-founder of Jews Rock, a Web site devoted to Jewish rock stars from The Beastie Boys to Yo La Tengo.

Update, April 30, 2008: Brothers Gonna Work It Out: Jeffrey Goldberg's latest.

The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq, by Fouad Ajami. Free Press, 378 pages, $26.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Alfred A. Knopf, 336 pages, $25.95.

Very few honest people dispute that the Iraq war has become an utter catastrophe. On Aug. 17, The New York Times quoted a “military affairs expert” who’d recently attended a White House briefing on Iraq, and who told the Times reporter: “Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy.” The last rickety plank in George W. Bush’s jury-rigged justification for the war is falling apart, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to calm the chaos that America has sown.

Yet if the failure of the war is no longer really debatable, the reasons for the failure are. Many erstwhile war supporters—especially liberals who were more concerned with human rights than W.M.D.’s—have tried to excuse their bad judgment by saying they couldn’t have foreseen how badly the occupation would be run. The war’s opponents, in turn, have angrily dismissed that argument as a pathetic way for hawks to avoid responsibility for the real-world results of their positions. “The incompetence critique is, in short, a dodge—a way for liberal hawks to acknowledge the obviously grim reality of the war without rethinking any of the premises that led them to support it in the first place,” Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias wrote last year in The American Prospect.

There’s some truth there. The war was built on deception and demagoguery, and no matter how it was run, it wouldn’t have protected America from mythical W.M.D. or severed the nonexistent nexus between Saddam and Al Qaeda. But it’s hard to read many of the new books about the Iraq war without being awed by the administration’s ineptitude, and convinced that things didn’t have to be this bad. Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco, Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City and James Fallows’ Blind into Baghdad offer a baroque kaleidoscope of ignorance and arrogance in, respectively, the Department of Defense, the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Bush administration. There’s evidence of a striking degree of self-sabotage in these narratives, and of a nearly Stalinist ideological conformity and contempt for empirical truth. If the incompetence dodge lets hawks like Thomas Friedman or Hillary Clinton evade their full measure of blame, the notion that the inferno in Iraq became inevitable the moment the war was launched lets far guiltier people off the hook.

“Here is the hardest question,” writes Mr. Fallows: “How could the administration have thought that it was safe to proceed in blithe indifference to the warnings of nearly everyone with operational experience in modern military occupations?”

Having opposed the war from the beginning, Mr. Fallows doesn’t need to exonerate himself by pleading shock at the war’s mismanagement. Blind into Baghdad, a book collecting his prescient, incisive reporting on Iraq policy for The Atlantic Monthly, begins with a farsighted piece he published before the invasion called “The Fifty-First State,” which sketches a vision of what occupying Iraq might entail. As he writes in the book’s introduction, consistent themes emerged from his prewar interviews with dozens of experts: “how long and difficult, as opposed to quick and easy, an occupation was likely to be; how important sectional and religious differences within Iraq would probably become; and how crucial it was for the new occupying power to ensure, from the very start, that a majority of Iraqis could see the benefits of an improved daily life, through physical security, a restored economy, and such mundane features as reliable electricity and water supplies.”

This passage serves as a retort to the unrepentant neoconservative Fouad Ajami, whose new book is interesting mainly as a reminder of the towering foolishness of the men who dreamed up this war. Mr. Ajami, who was born in Lebanon, tries to excuse America’s maladroit performance in Iraq by suggesting that no one could have predicted how the population would react. “[T]he steady refusal of the Shia to come out, openly and without equivocation, in support of this American project [was] one of the great surprises of the expedition into Iraq,” he writes, as if everyone had shared the ahistorical optimism of his clique.

Mr. Ajami’s book is likely to be embraced by conservative war supporters trying to rationalize the horror unleashed in Iraq. It’s a mendacious, revisionist defense of the neoconservative position posing as a melancholy lament for Iraq’s benighted Arabs. Mr. Ajami’s title, The Foreigner’s Gift, is wholly without irony. He faults the Iraqis for their “willfulness”—a word he uses repeatedly—and their ingratitude. He lionizes Ahmed Chalabi, attributing his troubles to threatened Sunni autocrats and their sympathizers in the C.I.A. and State Department. His very language is corrupted by propaganda—he uses the obnoxious Fox News phrase “homicide bomber” instead of the more descriptive “suicide bomber.”

To read this book is to realize how magical thinking utterly fogged the minds of the neocons. Despite Mr. Ajami’s claims, the difficulties facing America in Iraq should have come as no great surprise. What is surprising, though, is that a government full of educated and cunning men implemented no plans to deal with these difficulties. The second and third pieces in the Fallows book, “Blind into Baghdad” and “Bush’s Lost Year,” appeared in 2004; two years later, they remain startling in their depiction of an administration rigid in its refusal to prepare for any scenario that didn’t dovetail with its ideology. Indeed, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seems to have been doctrinally opposed to the kind of planning that might have prevented post-invasion problems. Mr. Fallows quotes Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, talking about his boss’ obsession with “uncertainty” and his weird hostility to predictions. “If anybody ever went through all of our records—and someday some people will, presumably—nobody will find a single piece of paper that says, ‘Mr. Secretary or Mr. President, let us tell you what postwar Iraq is going to look like, and here is what we need to plan for.’ If you tried that, you would get thrown out of Rumsfeld’s office so fast—if you ever went in there and said, ‘Let me tell you what something’s going to look like in the future,’ you wouldn’t get to your next sentence!”

The disasters and confusion recounted in Fiasco and Imperial Life in the Emerald City both follow from this criminally irresponsible aversion to planning. Both books are riveting and infuriating, and do much to fill in the details of the occupation’s misadventures and tragedies.

Mr. Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize–winning military reporter and a senior Pentagon correspondent at The Washington Post, tells his story through the words of hundreds of soldiers, so that Fiasco reads like an oral history of the war. Like almost all reporters, he deeply admires the troops, but his military expertise gives him the confidence to make stinging judgments about the conduct of some officers and their divisions as well as of the civilians in the Department of Defense. “The U.S. Army in Iraq—incorrect in its assumptions, lacking a workable concept of operations, and bereft of an overarching strategy—completed the job of creating the insurgency,” he writes.

Like other critics of the war, Mr. Ricks faults the Pentagon for not sending enough troops into Iraq. He depicts L. Paul Bremer—who replaced Lt. Gen. Jay Garner as head of the occupation—as a control freak who, ignoring expert advice, spurred the insurgency with his rash decisions to dissolve the Iraqi Army and to purge Baathists from public jobs. “Every insurgency faces three basic challenges as it begins: arming, financing, and recruiting,” he writes. Finding new members “is usually the most difficult of tasks for the insurgent cause,” but by disenfranchising tens of thousands of former soldiers and government workers, he argues, the United States offered its opponents a rich pool of enraged men on which to draw.

The American military also did its part, with mass arrests, indiscriminate destruction and the kidnapping of suspected insurgents’ wives and children—apparently a widespread practice. Without direction from above, divisions went their own way. Some—especially the 101st Airborne under the much-lauded Maj. Gen. David Petraeus—performed admirably. Others did not. According to Mr. Ricks, the Fourth Infantry Division under Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, which operated in the northern part of the Sunni triangle, was especially brutal. Mr. Ricks quotes an Army intelligence officer saying, “I saw so many instances of abuses of civilians, intimidating civilians, our jaws dropped.” (Mr. Ajami’s portrayal of Major General Odierno is, of course, wholly flattering).

NO AMOUNT O PLANNING CAN ERASE the uglier realities of war. But as Mr. Ricks makes clear, there was an almost total lack of counterinsurgency training for Iraq—a result of the administration’s refusal to admit that an insurgency was possible. “The war plan had called for the Iraqi population to cheerfully greet the American liberators, quickly establish a new government, and wave farewell to the departing American troops,” he writes.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book takes readers inside a hermetically sealed world governed by such fantasies: Baghdad’s Green Zone. Imperial Life in the Emerald City is another profoundly maddening book. To read it is to understand how Mao’s regime could celebrate the successes of the Great Leap Forward while millions of Chinese starved. Mr. Chandrasekaran shows us an American occupation in thrall to a Bush leadership cult, dismissive of experience and expertise and obsessed with doctrinal purity. He describes how potential hires were quizzed on their view of Roe v. Wade, and how young right-wingers were employed based on résumés they’d sent to the Heritage Foundation, then assigned to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget. Free traders and anti-tax crusaders with no experience in the developing world gleefully tried to remake Iraq’s economy in line with their dogma.

In one typical instance, a major G.O.P. donor named Thomas Foley arrived in Baghdad to oversee private-sector development. He told a contractor about his plans to privatize all of Iraq’s state-owned enterprises within 30 days. The contractor pointed out that international law forbids an occupation government from selling off assets. Mr. Chandrasekaran reports that Mr. Foley replied, “I don’t care about any of that stuff …. I don’t give a shit about international law. I made a commitment to the president that I’d privatize Iraq’s businesses.”

Perhaps everyone should have known that the administration would send people like that to Iraq. In retrospect, though, what’s most striking about the failed occupation is the extent to which the war planners put ideology over self-interest. It would have been good for Mr. Bush’s Presidency if he could have improved Iraq—but it seems the administration couldn’t behave decently even when doing so was politically advantageous.

I WASN'T FOR THE WAR, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to stand totally against it either, because I thought it might give Iraqis a chance at a better life. Saddam’s viciousness was perhaps the only thing that Mr. Bush didn’t exaggerate, and many of the Iraqi exiles I spoke to before the war were hoping for an invasion despite their distrust of American motives. I visited Baghdad for a couple of weeks in May of 2003, right after the occupation began. Back then, you could still drive around the streets, go to cafés and visit Iraqis’ houses. Mixed up with anger and suspicion and anxiety about the new order, there was a palpable sense of hope. The lack of electricity was debilitating, but everyone expected it to be back on soon. Whatever one thought of the Americans, few then doubted their mechanical know-how, their basic competence.

The electrical supply isn’t much better now than it was three years ago. I’m shamed by my former ambivalence about a war that has turned Iraq from a gulag into an abattoir. I wish I’d been full-throated in my opposition. But to say it had to be this way is to downplay the scope of the administration’s scandalous mismanagement and zealous blundering. The White House didn’t just make one massive mistake in going into Iraq. It made thousands.

Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (Norton) was published in May.