For Bush Junior, the transformation of daddy into a manageable entity must have been impossible. Instead, Bush Senior had to be appeased and pleased. The son had to direct his filial aggression elsewhere, toward surrogates. Saddam may have been the anti-daddy, but he was also ... daddy.

In Mr. Obama's case, as he himself recounts in his autobiography, the son turned the father into a myth. Then he subjugated the father to his own emotional needs, and finally emerged as a mythic figure himself, greater, larger and wiser than his fallible father. According to Jonathan Alter's indispensable book on Mr. Obama, Michelle Obama once said that "Barack spent so much time by himself that it was like he was raised by wolves." Mr. Alter adds that Michelle's "point was that like the mythical founders of Rome and other children of legend, Obama's superior strength and resilience were in part the products of his self-creation." Exactly right. Both the president and his wife no doubt believe that Mr. Obama resembles "mythical" figures who created themselves all on their own.

Right there, as the shrinks like to say, is work to be done. No one, regardless of his station in life, creates himself all on his own. No one transcends his traumas and wounds. The idea that one can do so is a basic adolescent fantasy (and the hidden pratfall at the heart of our national myth). Rather, the most successful personalities find a place for their pain, usually at the expense of either work or love, for the sake of some degree of work and love.

By his own account, Mr. Obama's life has entailed more trauma, displacement and confusion than that of any modern president. A politically ambitious man, he didn't choose to write his autobiography. He had to write it in order to control his story before the media could. In Mr. Obama's hands, an inner life of injury becomes a Homeric quest of the son for the father--never mind that just under the surface of his book lies a cold disdain for his negligent father.

Yet while some liberals swooned over the "literariness" of Mr. Obama's autobiography, other people read it with rising panic. Individuals who have experienced in childhood, as Mr. Obama did, an absent father and a frequently absent mother often construct grandiose images of themselves as sovereign and autonomous--"raised by wolves"--and as perfect and all-conquering. When these inflated selves meet criticism or opposition, they flounder and withdraw into brooding inaction. Mr. Obama himself cannot bear to be disliked. "His friends were legion," he writes about Barack Senior in his autobiography, tellingly ascribing to such stupendous popularity his father's election as president of the International Students Association at the University of Hawaii. When the country resists his presidential ministrations, Mr. Obama is thrown for a loop.

To my speculating mind, far from being unflappable and serene, which are traits that Mr. Obama's admirers like to attribute to him, the president is plagued by fits of depression that disable his ability to connect with other people and to make decisions. He exhibits the "beautiful calm of the hysteric," to borrow a phrase from Freud's teacher, Charcot. No wonder Mr. Obama's strongest historical identification is with the depressive Lincoln, who was also jocular around his friends and publicly composed. Riven by his parents, Mr. Obama has projected his shattered nature onto America itself. He wishes to heal and save the country as though it were little Barack. The abandoning father forsook both America and Barack Jr.; in rescuing America, the son will restore his paternity and complete his destiny. Since his very identity is bound up with his love for his country, Mr. Obama's psychic life must have the intensity of an emergency.

Though galleys for Dinesh D'Souza's forthcoming book of psycho-political analysis, The Roots of Obama's Rage, have been "embargoed," as publishers like grandiosely to say, Mr. D'Souza has posted a description of the book on his Web site. There Mr. Obama is described as "an exponentially more dangerous man than you'd ever imagined." According to Mr. D'Souza, "what really motivates Barack Obama is an inherited rage, an often masked, but profound rage that comes from his African father; an anticolonialist rage against Western dominance, and most especially against the wealth and power of the very nation Barack Obama now leads." This anticolonialist rage against America is "why Obama's economic policies are actually designed to make America poorer compared to the rest of the world. Why Obama will welcome a nuclear Iran. Why Obama sees America as a rogue nation worse than North Korea." Mr. D'Souza comes to a dangerous conclusion: Mr. Obama "poses an existential threat to America."

Treason is defined in the Constitution as "adhering to [America's] enemies, giving them aid or comfort."  When he writes that Mr. Obama seeks to weaken America economically and militarily, describes our elected president as "dangerous" and, worst of all, declares that Mr. Obama "poses an existential threat to America," Mr. D'Souza is accusing Obama of adhering to America's enemies and giving them aid or comfort. Mr. D'Souza is calling President Obama a traitor.

In other words, Mr. D'Souza has painted an unhinged portrait of what he murderously believes is an unhinged president. His "thesis" is the most disturbing case of self-enclosed projection you will ever see. In the process of accusing Mr. Obama of being a traitor, Mr. D'Souza himself incites treason: His remarks amount to a call to assassinate the president. (But, then, Mr. D'Souza has elsewhere sympathetically described Osama bin Laden, America's mortal enemy, as "a quiet, well-mannered, thoughtful, eloquent and deeply religious person.") Talking about his book with Glenn Beck, Mr. D'Souza raised suspicions about the alienness of Mr. Obama's name, yet he has never changed his own name, which in Hindi means "God of the Sun." In an essay adapted from his book in Forbes, he writes ominously about Mr. Obama that "[h]ere is a man who spent his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa." But Mr. D'Souza himself didn't come to America from his native India until he was 17. He waited 13 years before becoming an American citizen, and he wasn't exactly over the moon about it when he did. Speaking about his decision to apply for American citizenship, he says that in America he experienced "an uncomfortable search for a congruence of values and principles. Was I really at home in the American system as constructed? I concluded ultimately that I was." Well, the "God of the Sun" had to settle down somewhere.

Mr. D'Souza was never very enamored with American life. Commenting on the time he spent as an exchange student in Arizona, he said that "I viewed my exchange here as a sort of tourist spectacle." He certainly doesn't think much of American education. Attending high school in Arizona "was like going back to eighth grade, academically speaking," he says. As for his decision to go to Dartmouth, he chose it "pretty much out of the catalogue." He is every bit the overcooked caricature of Anglo-aristocratic superiority, every bit the pampered son of arrogant colonial parents, who fled their native Goa when India's annexation of the former Portuguese colony threatened their status. One imagines that in cosmopolitan Bombay, Dinesh's parents, Alan and Margaret D'Souza, could again ingratiate themselves with the socially powerful. They could once again pretend to be the type of superior, contemptuous, high-class people they aspired to be.

Do you think I'm being mean? Mr. D'Souza describes Mr. Obama's father as a "philandering, inebriated African socialist," someone who "drank himself into stupors, and bounced around on two iron legs (after his real legs had to be amputated because of a car crash caused by his drunk driving)." The Goebbels-like derision is indecent enough; and the inference that the son duplicates the father is alien to American mores. But the "existential" "danger" of this "God of the Sun" putting a president's life in danger in order to express his own hatred of America is an insult to civilized life. It makes you wonder whether Mr. D'Souza's type of congenital contempt is not the most whopping problem of them all.

editorial@observer.com

Alter was on his way to "The Obama Book Club," a 2 p.m. reading with him and Steven Rattner. Rattner's book, Overhaul, deals with the president's auto bailouts; The Promise describes his first year in office.

Alter said he'd recently learned that his book will be at No. 4 on The Times' best-seller list to be published June 6. The only people ahead of him were non–New Yorkers, he added—so for The Observer's readership, that was basically No. 1.

And what about his embattled magazine?

Alter said he was "cautiously optimistic" that Newsweek would find a buyer.

Ben Smith reported today:

Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel kept a backchannel open to News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, telling him the White House "welcomed his ideas," Jonathan Alter reports in his new book on Obama's first year.

The goal of the calls: To maintain warm relations with the Wall Street Journal.

More here.

Managing editor Dan Klaidman has signed a contract with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to write his first book, which will explore President Obama's anti-terrorism policy, according to Mike Allen's Playbook.

Danny calls it "a narrative that takes readers inside the administration's efforts to re-balance terrorism policies in the aftermath of Bush-Cheney-Addington-Yoo. By looking at the struggle to close Gitmo, the controversy over the KSM trial, how Team Obama handled the Zazi, Abdulmutallab and Shahzad cases and many other still-secret episodes in Obama's War on Terror, the book will explore the immense challenges of developing smart, tough, prudent and just anti-terrorism policies in an age of extreme political polarization."

Mr. Klaidman has a working title for the book—The Arc of Justice: Obama, Terrorism and the Struggle over American Ideals—which is due out in 2012. (We wonder how National Book Award–winning author Kevin Boyle feels about another book called Arc of Justice.)

This month Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter is coming out with his own Obama book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One, which follows the release of David Remnick's The Bridge last month.

This is the second book Mr. Scheiber has sold and started. His first, a biography of Hank Greenberg, burned up in the fire that was last fall's federal takeover of AIG. Mr. Scheiber at the time was about a third of the way through the book, but decided when the insurance giant failed that an interpretive biography of its former CEO no longer seemed like such a great idea.

The timing was particularly punishing because Mr. Scheiber might have been able to finish the book a lot sooner and have it on shelves in time for the meltdown if he hadn’t been so busy covering the election for TNR. Doing that took up all his time starting in August 2007, and by the time AIG crashed into the headlines last fall, he was already unsure as to whether he wanted to continue with it.

The book, originally, was acquired by Random House in May 2005, not long after Mr. Greenberg’s ouster from AIG over an accounting scandal. When Mr. Scheiber told his editor there, Tim Bartlett, that he didn’t want to write the book anymore, he did not face much resistance. Figure out another book and move on, Mr. Scheiber was told, and when you have a new proposal ready, just give Random House the right of first refusal. If Random wanted to publish it, great—if they didn’t, Mr. Scheiber could sell it to someone else and pay back the Greenberg advance when he got his new one.

“My feeling was that if he didn’t feel he wanted to do it or could do it, I wasn’t going to push him,” Mr. Bartlett said. “It was an obvious time to say, ‘If we’re going to do it, we should try to do it quickly.’ But I think by that point, he had realized it wasn’t the book he was going to write.”

Indeed, reporting on the election had prepared Mr. Scheiber to write a very different kind of book—one that would align with his day job covering economic policy for TNR rather than distracting him from it.

But when the proposal for the new book was completed last month and submitted, Random House passed.

“It was a very good proposal and I’m sure it’s going to be a good book,” Mr. Bartlett said. “It really came down to a concern that there were going to be too many books on the economic crisis.”

Mr. Bartlett had learned the hard way that entering such a competition can be frustrating, having published a book he loved about Hurricane Katrina by Pulitzer Prize winner Jed Horne that ended up being obscured by the stack of other titles on the same subject.

That experience, Mr. Bartlett said, “makes you look very carefully at projects like this.”

The field is indeed crowded: Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter and Mr. Scheiber’s former TNR colleague Ryan Lizza, for instance, are both writing books about Obama’s first year in office, and One Percent Doctrine author Ron Suskind is said to be in the early stages of reporting a book on the economic crisis as well. (Mr. Suskind did not respond to an email asking about his plans, but the publicity director at HarperCollins, his publisher, confirmed that he is under contract for another book.)

Mr. Scheiber’s book can be expected to focus more narrowly on Obama’s economic team and their agenda than Mr. Alter’s or Mr. Lizza’s.

“Noam’s book will be reported from inside and out of the administration and will ultimately make a judgment about how well it has succeeded,” said Simon & Schuster’s Ms. Painton, who spent most of her career in journalism before entering book publishing last year.

Asked whether she has found that the skills required to edit books are different from those she learned in journalism, Ms. Painton said in an email, “I think many of the basic skills between long form journalism and book editing are the same—the metabolism is different. You have to respect the voice of the author, love the arc and rhythm of the story, test the evidence, construct an argument, know where to go deep and how to make the writing seductive. Those qualities are essential in both long form journalism and book writing. But it takes a lot of endurance to get there when you're telling a story at book length. Less sprinting, more marathoning.”

Mr. Scheiber, who declined to comment for this article because the book is a work-in-progress, is aiming to complete his marathon in time for publication in early 2012.

The two books will be quite different: Where Mr. Maraniss means to write a retrospective biography in the tradition of his Bill Clinton book First in His Class, Mr. Alter is planning to look at President Obama's first year or so in office, starting at his inauguration and ending "at some point midway through 2009."

Speaking from his phone in Chicago, Mr. Alter said he plans to write about the Obama administration the way one might write about an internet start-up company. He said he wants to write about "what happens when an irresistible force meets an immoveable object in the form of Washington, D.C. and the status quo,” and predicted that the theme would be "the reality of hope."

Mr. Alter's last book, The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope was recently mentioned on Larry King Live by Paul Begala, who said that President-elect Obama had been quoting from it and invoking its title.

Here's a snapshot of Ms. Fowler's big weekend (as compiled with the help of the redoubtable Jim Romenesko):

Saturday: The Los Angeles Times' James Rainey profiled Ms. Fowler calling her a "61-year-old self-described 'failed writer' and amateur Web journalist helped create two of the most unexpected moments in the 2008 election." (Media Mob previously noted this piece here.)

Sunday: The New York Times' Jacques Steinberg wrote an "Ideas and Trends" column for the Week in Review in which he quotes Newsweek's Jonathan Alter say Ms. Fowler's antics "makes it very difficult for the rest of us to do our jobs... If you don’t have trust, you don’t get good stories. If someone comes along and uses deception to shatter that trust, she has hurt the very cause of a free flow of public information that she claims she wants to assist." Mr. Steinberg also quotes producer-turned-blogger Jan Hamsher saying, “It’s hurting America that journalists consider their first loyalty to be to their subjects, and not to the people they’re reporting for." (Old Media vs. New, round 400: This time it's personal!)

The Independent calls Ms. Fowler "a poster girl for this new era of political journalism" and notes her "soft, musing style that has won her numerous followers... she blurred a line that many in traditional US journalism have been ferociously trying to hold, against all the odds – namely the line between objective reporter and a partisan."

Today: The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz weighs in with his column: "Fowler is part of a new breed -- citizen journalist, liberal advocate, agent provocateur."

Tomorrow: Book deal? Daily Show with Jon Stewart interview? MSNBC show? Tune in and see.

Mixed Wingnuts Writer Roy Edroso compiles The Official Village Voice Election- Season Guide to the Right-Wing Blogosphere. Notables include Rod Dreher ("Cheerful when discussing food or “sluts”; otherwise, grimly millenarian"); Jonah Goldberg ("Goldberg's comical persona—once pretty much all he had—is now mainly a fallback position in his attempts at serious commentary."); and the always fun Michelle Malkin ("STUPID/EVIL RATIO: 97/3").

I Love the 80s Newsweek's Jonathan Alter talks to Mediabistro's Kathryn Carlson and shares this career high: "When I started covering the media in 1984, there were very few media critics in the United States. At one point, I was named one of the top ten media critics in America and my parents were very pleased—but I had to tell them that there were only ten media critics in America."

Sensitive Siegel Don't ask Against The Machine author Lee Siegel for an interview if you've ever written anything critical about him. Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici learned that when a publicist from Siegel's publisher cancelled an interview on account of having "written negatively about Lee on your Portfolio blog."

The expanded invitation was a break from the usual Wednesday routine, according to a Newsweek staffer. But crisis management at the embattled newsweekly had reached a crucial point. Two days earlier, editor Mark Whitaker had retracted a May 9 item about alleged Koran abuse at Guantánamo Bay. Now, top executives had descended on New York. Donald Graham, chief executive of the Washington Post Company, came in from Washington; Newsweek chairman and editor in chief Richard M. Smith had cut short a trip to Asia and flown back.

Mr. Graham opened the meeting with a speech seeking to rally the staff, according to one person who was in the room. He recalled his tenure as publisher of The Washington Post in 1981, when Janet Cooke's Pulitzer Prize–winning story of a child drug addict was exposed as a fraud.

Newsweek's error, Mr. Graham told staffers, would be mentioned high up when other people wrote about the magazine. Still, he said, with time, the reference would drop from the first paragraph to the last; Newsweek's reputation would heal. Unlike Ms. Cooke, Mr. Graham said, Newsweek's reporters hadn't knowingly done wrong.

"He wasn't minimizing the mistake that was made," the staffer said. "He was distinguishing it from these other [scandals]."

The staffer added: "In some ways, he was saying it was like Janet Cooke: When you went out into the wider world, everyone was talking about it."

But Newsweek, for its part, decided to tone down the talking. Following Mr. Graham's address, the editors and staff hunkered down for their weekly cover decision. At a meeting the day before, according to two staffers who'd been present, the staff had contemplated preparing a cover package pegged to the Periscope controversy.

Another staffer, who wasn't present at the meeting but had been briefed on the package, described the concept as an overview about "What's Wrong With the Media?" While the planning was only preliminary and no pieces had been assigned, the editors had discussed potential elements of the package, including pieces by guest contributors, a piece on blogs and the media by Steven Levy, and a meditation on sourcing by Jonathan Alter.

The editors decided, however, to shelve the idea. Instead, they picked newly elected Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for the cover, fronting a package about the growing political influence of Latinos. The media package would be scaled down and put in the inside.

"Every week, we debate various options for the cover as the week progresses," Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker said in an e-mail statement. "We had been talking for months about the possibility of doing a cover on Latino political power if Villaraigosa was elected mayor of Los Angeles, and on Wednesday after he won decisively it felt like a smart and timely call."

Mr. Whitaker added the magazine's story mix-and how much attention to give its own coverage-was based on the same news judgment that guides his staff each week.

"We made those decisions the way we always do: based on what we think will be of most interest to our readers," he said.

The newsroom had been dreading the prospect of giving the media story more prominent play. "There was a thought," said one staffer who wasn't present at the cover meeting, "that if we put us on the cover, it would blow up again."

The editors' calculations were guided, in part, by a rapidly moving news cycle. Under prolonged scrutiny, the initial media-scandal concept-"Newsweek Item, Badly Sourced, Sparks Lethal Muslim Riots"-had been modified bit by bit: Had the item really caused the rioting, or was it merely a pretext? Had Newsweek really been unusually reckless and inflammatory compared to other outlets? Was the alleged desecration of the Koran by U.S. guards more egregious and unlikely than, say, setting attack dogs on naked Muslim prisoners?

Meanwhile, the White House had gone from denouncing Newsweek's journalistic standards to defending itself from charges of disingenuousness-what was that about anonymous sourcing again?-and of bullying. By May 17, the press corps had turned openly skeptical, if not hostile, toward the administration: "With respect, who made you the editor of Newsweek?" ABC's Terry Moran asked Presidential press secretary Scott McClellan. "Do you think it's appropriate for you, at that podium, speaking with the authority of the President of the United States, to tell an American magazine what they should print?"

That transcript, posted the same day on the Drudge Report, helped convince Newsweek that the tide was turning, two Newsweek staffers said.

"We decided that getting into the whole media–White House thing was for other people to do," Mr. Alter said. "It would be defensive for us to make these points-though I have to admit it was hard to resist, given how glaring the hypocrisy was."

Mr. Alter also said that the introspective cover package was treated like any other news topic that was losing steam. "We're always going to assess what a story will look like the following week, depending on how much news energy it would have," Mr. Alter said. "The [Newsweek] story peaked on Monday. Very rarely do we do extensive coverage of a story that breaks early in the week."

So Newsweek ended up with a scaled-down treatment of journalistic fallibility. Mr. Alter weighed in on the necessities and pitfalls of anonymous sourcing. Mr. Whitaker addressed the scandal in his editor's note, and Mr. Smith wrote a 900-plus-word letter to the readers pledging to tighten up the standards for anonymous sourcing. Evan Thomas and Michael Isikoff-the latter of whom had written the initial item-reported on the Pentagon's investigation of Guantánamo Bay log entries for evidence of Koran abuse.

Internally, the magazine had decided by the end of the week not to go down a Times-ian road of public soul-searching and investigation. Newsweek, said former assistant managing editor Sarah Crichton, "is not a blame-filled organization …. I've worked at places where, when something happens, people's heads have to roll. At Newsweek, that's not how it happens."

"It would have been hard if, layered on top of everything we were going through with the public, we had been at each other's throats," Mr. Alter said.

Before the end of the workday on May 18, Mr. Smith sent an e-mail to the staff via spokesman Ken Weine, voicing his support for Mr. Whitaker's response to the crisis. "After returning from my abbreviated trip to Asia," he wrote, "I have had a chance to thoroughly review the handling of our story …. As Mark and I agreed early on, the only honorable course for Newsweek was to retract the story."

Mr. Smith followed up with a second staff e-mail on May 21, when the issue closed, offering a preview of his letter to the readers. "I want you to take a close look at the last paragraph in particular," he wrote. "It applies to the entire Newsweek staff." In that letter, the chairman had written: "I can assure you that the talented and honorable people who publish Newsweek today are dedicated to making sure that what appears on every page in the magazine is as fair and accurate as it can possibly be."

"In this particular case," Mr. Alter said, "scapegoating wasn't merited, because we were victimized by a source-not by a bad apple in the ranks …. [T]his was not a case of gross malfeasance at the reporting or editing level. I think that made it easier for people not to turn on each other, because there really wasn't anybody to blame."

-Gabriel Sherman

"There's an ambient level of discontent in the newsroom," Bill Keller said, "and that's useful."

Mr. Keller, the New York Times executive editor, was on the phone May 23, discussing his appointment of Sam Sifton to the post of Times culture editor-and how the move fit into his management theory.

Mr. Sifton, 38, had ascended to the top of the sprawling department after a months-long public bake-off in which he and Jim Schachter, the section's deputies, had been vying to succeed term-limited culture chief Jonathan Landman. Mr. Sifton declined to discuss his promotion or his editorial agenda.

Mr. Landman's job had been to implement The Times' plans to revamp the culture pages: expanding breaking-news coverage, restructuring editorial portfolios, and overseeing high-profile hires that included film critic Manohla Dargis, Hollywood editor Michael Cieply and architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. With those changes largely in place, The Times was seeking a more arts-focused boss to oversee the operations of the department, which includes some 100 reporters, editors and critics.

Under Mr. Landman, each deputy had supervised a separate collection of departments. Mr. Sifton's bailiwick included coverage of art, theater, architecture and books, while Mr. Schachter oversaw The Times' film, television and music reports.

"Lines of authority were strained at times," one culture staffer said.

Culture staffers said that both editors commanded loyalty from their subordinates, and that Mr. Sifton's supporters were perhaps more vocal in championing his campaign.

But Mr. Keller said that popularity hadn't guided his selection. "In the end, it's not a plebiscite," he said.

The executive editor added that he hadn't feared the decision would be divisive. "I think, in this case, whichever choice we made, the department would have been well run and people would have felt a lot of respect toward their leader," Mr. Keller said. "So the concern that one faction or another might have been upset wasn't a huge factor in this decision. It's sort of something you want to know, in case you're in danger of setting off a major insurrection, but that wasn't really the factor here."

Throughout the running, Mr. Sifton was reputed to be the initial front-runner, though as the decision neared a countervailing rumor circulated that The Times would go with the more news-centric Mr. Schachter.

Mr. Keller's memo announcing the decision didn't dwell on any thwarted aspirations. It was fulsome in its praise-describing the department as "the finest staff of culture journalists working anywhere" (take that, Cahiers du Cinema!)-and relentlessly upbeat about the extent of the "collaborative spirit" in the department.

"Sam and Jim and the amazing Jodi Kantor and their colleagues lifted one another up," Mr. Keller wrote. The process, he added, "was a triumph of collegiality without compromise."

"Lifted one another up"? "Collegiality"? Just how far is Mr. Keller planning to take this whole everybody-wins attitude?

"I like people with some spine," Mr. Keller said. "It's not really a matter of trying to populate the newsroom with peacemakers."

Mr. Keller said he wasn't aiming to smooth over rifts left over from the Howell Raines regime. "I certainly hope [my appointments] are not pacifiers," he said. "I've always bristled a little at this notion that my job when I came in was to settle the place down."

Suddenly, Anodyne Bill was starting to sound like a feisty Alabaman. "The last thing you want in a newspaper is for people to settle down," Mr. Keller said. "You want them to be aggressive and competitive and anxious and even paranoid sometimes, a little neurotic-I mean, that's the fun of the place."

Talk about competitive metabolism!

Despite the handholding in the culture department, Mr. Keller said The Times wouldn't be The Times if the newsroom didn't grumble. Hence his praise for the constructive power of discontent.

"It comes from having people who tend to be hard to satisfy," Mr. Keller said. "You just don't want it to rise to the level where the institution is devouring itself."

-G.S.

New York Times pundit standings, May 17-23:

1. Frank Rich, score 24.0 [rank last week: 1st]

2. Paul Krugman, 12.5 [2nd]

3. David Brooks, 7.5 [tie-7th]

4. Thomas L. Friedman, 7.0 [3rd]

5. Bob Herbert, 5.0 [6th]

6. Nicholas D. Kristof, 4.5 [4th]

7. (tie) Matt Miller, 0.0 [5th]

John Tierney, 0.0 [tie-7th]

The Times is right-class does matter! Frank Rich, lord of the rebuilt Sunday Op-Ed page, ran away with the Most E-Mailed title again this week. Mr. Rich's musings on the Newsweek scandal trailed only the science story about the female orgasm on the 25 Most E-Mailed list. But his fellow pundits saw scores depressed across the board, their columns crowded off the list by stories from The Times' giant series on class in America. John Tierney, despite writing about Darth Vader, held onto his untouchable caste status, joined by Maureen Dowd substitute Matt Miller at the scoreless bottom of the pecking order.

-Tom Scocca

Correction: Last week's essay on Radar magazine and the state of the magazine industry misrepresented Michael Wolff's intentions for New York magazine. Mr. Wolff e-mailed to explain that while he had sought, with a group of investors, to buy New York, he had no intention of editing the magazine himself. "I would never want to be an editor," Mr. Wolff wrote. "I don't have the skills, temperament, or interest." Tom Scocca regrets the error.