"The City section was one of my favorite sections of the newspaper," said the novelist and essayist Thomas Beller by telephone from New Orleans, where he's currently teaching at Tulane University. "I'm quite upset about it as a reader."

Essayist and Vintage publicist Sloane Crosley called it "a legitimate loss, both literally and symbolically."

Since 1993, City had been a quiet, quirky presence within the larger local edition of the Sunday Times. Edited by Connie Rosenblum since 1997, City took a street-level view of the five boroughs that felt like a break from the multiple-front assault of status anxieties unleashed by the pre-recession Style, Real Estate, and Travel sections, and the various versions of the high-end style guide T.

Unlike its glammier sister sections, City was for smaller subjects like Adam B. Ellick's 2007 piece about the dumpling-making women of St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church or Jennifer Bleyer's last go 'round at the Empire Roller Skating Center in Crown Heights from the same year. It was a place for Times reporters like Charlie LeDuff (now of The Detroit News) to flex more Joseph Mitchell–ish chops and bend his elbows once a week. But, most especially, it was a place for writers to wax poetic about life in New York City, to write personal essays that might not have found a home anywhere else. (This reporter, included.)

"My favorite part of the section is New York Observed," said The Ten-Cent Plague author David Hajdu, referring to the (usually) first-person essays in the section. "I like the scale of New York Observed. There was an appropriateness of scale that is rarer and rarer and as a result more and more precious."

Mr. Hajdu, who recently wrote an essay about Riverside Park, applauded the section's "absence of hype and zeitgeist," saying the editors tend to "ignore and even defy the buzz."

Essayist and novelist Phillip Lopate, who contributed to the section ever since Ms. Rosenblum brought him over from her previous section, Arts & Leisure, seemed to agree. "What I'm finding in newspapers in general and The Times in particular is that on the one hand you have the standard journalistic writing with its contemporary clichés. ... And then you have the entertainment pages in which The Times, playing catch-up, is more and more trying to sound hip. But they never can," he told The Observer. "So they fling around all these slang terms like 'the big kahuna'—that was in the paper yesterday. And, there's something a little bit coarse and vulgar about this attempt to wink-wink at the reader.

"The City section was something different," he said. "The prose style was on a higher level than that kind of excessively casual, 'We're all fascinated with rap stars' kind of writing. ... Part of the problem is, looking at it from a larger perspective, that The Times has so much talent in these slightly older editors. They're just so scared of a graying demographic that they keep wanting to get younger and hipper, so in a way, Connie is in an awkward place."

Ms. Rosenblum, whose book about the Bronx's Grand Concourse, Boulevard of Dreams, will be coming out in August, told readers of the NYTimes.com's Talk to the Newsroom what she looked for in 2008: "[W]e ask our writers and ourselves to use eyes and ears, to walk the streets of individual neighborhoods and see firsthand what's out there. This approach can yield rich rewards."

The result is pieces like this week's "Plot Twist at the Actors’ Temple" or "The Trouble With Trees". It may also explain why writers find themselves mourning the loss of the section. One of them, Thomas Pryor, will be hosting a "toast" to the section on May 4 at the bar 17: It's hard to imagine a  similar event in honor of, say, Escapes, which is also being folded into the larger Times.

"Where are we gonna find those pieces—those neighborhood pieces?" Mr. Hajdu wondered. "I'm not inclined to over-romanticize or glorify the mundane, but what you'd find there in unexpected quarters of the City were wonderful surprises."

Mr. Lopate, who has written profiles of architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable as well as numerous essays about Robert Moses, the AIA Guide, and other topics for City, calls those sorts of articles "urban sketches." He said that he and Mr. Beller, who has a Web site devoted to the genre, had once fantasized about putting together an anthology.

"The urban sketches are a noble form which has a long relationship to newspapers," Mr. Lopate said. "Connie was recruiting writers to stretch out and do things which were reflective. Of course, newspapers have very little room for that. They used to have much more room for it." In the past a writer like George Plimpton could dash off a Talk of the Town about a man talking to himself on an imaginary cellular phone for The New Yorker, but good luck getting something like that in print today.

"I think that writers of any age who are into quirky, slice-of-life pieces that used to run a lot more in Talk of the Town and still do occasionally, it kind of was the only game in town," said Jetpack Dreams author and City contributor Mac Montandon. "For a lot of people it was the first section of The Times they wrote for. For younger journalists, it's a huge loss."

In her Talk to the Newsroom chat, Ms. Rosenblum addressed those young journalists, saying, "We rely largely on a small (half a dozen at the peak) group of young or youngesh [sic] journalists, many of them not long out of journalism school, who have an interest in writing about city affairs and don't mind the ups and downs of the freelance life."

When the redesigned Sunday Metro section hits newsstands May 24, we'll see how much room is left for those writers and their work in The New York Times. Mr. Beller is hopeful that some of Ms. Rosenblum's formula will continue to find a home. "I think the importance of the City section is not that it's a stand-alone section but that it had an editorial mission distinct from the paper," said Mr. Beller, who's written about everything from lost gloves to his apartment for the section. "It's not about coverage, it's about the kind of pieces they ran."

"Its not The Southern Oracle," Ms. Crosley—who's written several of the New York Observed essays—emailed from Paris, referring to the last-chance entry from the children's film The Neverending Story. "There are other ways in. But the City's seat within The Times mimicked the very beat it covered. [I]t always maintained a neighborhood vibe."

"Who wouldn't be sad to see that go?" she asked. "It's like watching your favorite building get torn down."

It's hard finding just one thing to quote from the long, admiring review, which takes into account a man with a long, admirable life, but here's one little nugget.

Per Mr. Carter:

If you're interested in seeing some of the roles Mr. Plimpton did have time for, Blake Wilson, writing for The Times' Paper Cuts Blog, presents The George Plimpton Film Festival.

Mr. Carter also manages to get meta while talking about the founding of The Paris Review, which sounds suspiciously like his own start-up a generation later, but now feels like a misdirected telegram from a lost world:

“I thought the magazine was physically unattractive,” he told The Observer on a recent rainy afternoon. He was behind his glass-topped desk, in a large, private office in the back of the magazine’s newish floor-through space in a Tribeca loft building, approximately four miles from the old home of the magazine in the bottom of Plimpton’s townhouse on East 64th Street. There, a bicycle hung from the rafters. Here—except for the stuffed birds hanging from the ceiling and the pool table—it’s all business, albeit in the downtown creative idiom: high ceilings, light wood floors, shiny glass. In Mr. Gourevitch’s office, neat rows of back issues of his own magazine, as well as those of magazines such as Granta and the now-defunct Grand Street, lined the walls.

The 45-year-old Mr. Gourevitch is, like the young Plimpton, personally attractive and preternaturally successful. He also writes for The New Yorker, and his book about Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, was well received. Another book, A Cold Case, is being made into a movie starring Tom Hanks with a screenplay by John Sayles and Eric Roth. His hair is a curly black mop, his dark eyes piercing; he moves his hands when he talks. When Mr. Gourevitch took over the highbrow literary magazine, he was charged with the formidable—some might say unenviable—task of revitalizing a magazine that had for decades been the expression in print of George Plimpton, arguably New York’s most fashionable and well-loved arbiter of literary taste.

He did not immediately follow Plimpton in the role. First there was Brigid Hughes, then 32 years old, who had spent her entire professional life at the magazine under Plimpton; her last job before taking over was managing editor. But The Review’s dissatisfied board of directors threw her out in early 2005, after a tenure of just one year.

At the time, at least part of the New York literary world was not so happy to see the cord cut connecting the magazine’s future to its Plimptonian past. In an article about Ms. Hughes’ ouster, Charles McGrath wrote in The New York Times that “her failing appears to be that she was insufficiently Plimptonian and excessively Plimptonian at the same time.” (She has since started her own literary magazine, A Public Space, taking a few loyalists with her.)

Mr. Gourevitch is neither. But when he talks about the magazine, and the major changes he has brought to it in two and a half years on the job, the specter of Plimpton is always just threatening to peek in from the margins.

One of the first tasks was a major redesign, which, Mr. Gourevitch said, was not done simply to establish his mastery of the magazine.

“It wasn’t simply to say, ‘I’m here,’” he said, before giving a history of the physical form of the magazine.

“The first issues were very thin and on light paper, and as it went along it got thicker, and that stabilized. In the last five years it got really fat. It was like 400 pages. It was actually physically hard to open! If you opened it up it would break the spine and snap shut like it didn’t want you to read it, and it kind of had this archaic feel which made it seem as though it wasn’t so classy anymore. So it was a sense that it felt uninviting, and it got thick in the way that made me think—can all this stuff really be that good?”

Mr. Gourevitch’s eighth issue was published last week, and Picador will release a new volume of the magazine’s famous interviews with writers this week. Both speak to Mr. Gourevitch’s ambition for the magazine and his position on its 54-year history.

This year The Paris Review won a National Magazine Award, its first ever, for photojournalism—which is something the magazine didn’t even do before Mr. Gourevitch came on board—for a portfolio of photographs taken in Kibera, on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, “one of the world’s biggest slums,” as the accompanying text reads.

The new issue includes a portfolio of photographs of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug lord, and an interview with the Israeli novelist David Grossman.

Figures supplied by the magazine seem to show a more than 70 percent increase in its paid circulation and doubled newsstand sales since Mr. Gourevitch took over. It’s still not an industry powerhouse, with distribution a relatively small 14,000 copies per issue.

And as the memory of Plimpton fades, the onus will increasingly be on Mr. Gourevitch to convince readers (and writers) that this relatively small endeavor is more than just an extension of Plimpton’s personality—that without his promotional power it can be not only solvent, but relevant; and not just what Farrar, Straus & Giroux editor Jonathan Galassi, who was the magazine’s poetry editor from 1978 to 1988, told The Observer he thought of as “the American-in-Paris Review. Now, said Mr. Galassi, “it’s more the foreign correspondent than the American in Paris.”

But some, if not most, of the magazine’s appeal never had anything to do with what was actually in the magazine; it was about the idea of the magazine, the mystique associated with it as a place where young lovers of literature, most of whom were the well-groomed and well-mannered graduates of the nation’s elite colleges, could apprentice for a year, or more, after college, and attend some glamorous parties in exchange for reading through the slush pile.

(The parties now held at the magazine’s office are still the best opportunity for Manhattan’s most promising editorial assistants to brush up against the likes of Salman Rushdie, who was at last week’s soiree for the Fall issue.)

Plimpton was in large part the perpetuator of this mystique—he was, after all, the man who was a professional amateur (or, more pejoratively, a dilettante), who seems to have been engaging and wildly intellectually curious and more than a little mischievous, and he also happened to have loads of rich friends whom he was able to convince to support his little but influential magazine. For most of his tenure, the magazine was run as a for-profit enterprise, though most of the time there wasn’t much profit to speak of. Plimpton himself never took a salary, and some years it was only due to his largesse that the magazine stayed alive.

At the same time, he cultivated a motley crew of interns and “editorial assistants” who were welcome to work for free at his townhouse, many of whom (Mr. Gourevitch’s wife, the New Yorker writer Larissa MacFarquhar, among them) went on to illustrious publishing careers of their own. But it was never the kind of place that made much of an effort to hire writers or editors who were not of a social milieu that would have been unfamiliar to Plimpton. One of the current board members, Antonio Weiss, who is a managing director in Paris at the investment bank Lazard, is Plimpton’s former assistant and a former editor at the magazine, and is married to the magazine’s Paris editor, Susannah Hunnewell. He recalled that he was an editor of the literary magazine as an undergraduate at Yale, “which was sort of a link into The Paris Review,” he told The Observer by phone. “I got to know George just by being around.”

Does that New York really still exist? In some ways, that’s the question that faces Mr. Gourevitch’s Paris Review. He probably wouldn’t put it that way, but he does think that a magazine has to be relevant, has to be of its time.

“Even the ones that are really great, they belong to a moment, a certain kind of getting together of energy and taste,” he said. “And often the editors themselves are new writers, and everyone either fails miserably or succeeds spectacularly, and the energy is not in that place anymore and another group starts up another magazine.”

Mr. Gourevitch’s Paris Review is another magazine. Though he never, exactly, criticizes his predecessor, and certainly not by name, Mr. Gourevitch seems to regard Plimpton’s tenure as one of some rather unrealized potential. “Yes, it was a little bit madcap and it was kind of funny,” he said. “But it’s important to me that this is not a break from the past. It is an attempt to take something and give it a rethink that it hadn’t really been given. It was sort of moving on momentum for a long time. And some bits of it were great—the interviews—but some were clearly better edited than others.”

Among Mr. Gourevitch’s signature early moves was to fire the magazine’s longtime poetry editor, Richard Howard, in favor of the poets Charles Simic, who is also a professor at the University of New Hampshire, and Meghan O’Rourke, who is also the literary editor of Slate.

Legend has it that Mr. Howard was known for encouraging his Columbia M.F.A. students to submit poems to the magazine.

“I thought the magazine just had way too many things in it,” said Mr. Gourevitch. “It had way too many poets—not poems, but poets. Are you telling me, as an editor, that there are 30 poets I must not miss for this quarter? Is there not something else out there, considering that this magazine is not the sole outlet for poetry? I don’t believe it. So then, I think you are actually throwing way too much stuff at me waiting to see if it will stick, and I would much rather be given a much more contained choice.” Today, the magazine has cut its poet quotient by about two-thirds, publishing around 10 per issue. Mr. Gourevitch’s most recent hire is Matt Weiland, who swapped his deputy editor position at Granta for the same title at The Paris Review.

And then there are less tangible changes. According to Mr. Gourevitch, the magazine had early on proceeded from a certain antiacademic vocation. Here’s how Mr. Gourevitch paraphrased George Plimpton’s early mission for the magazine, from the manifesto that appeared with the first issue of The Paris Review:

“It’s not really philistines that are going to kill us, it’s learned chatter that is going to kill us, and that is going to kill literature, and what this magazine should be is for the good writers, not people who are table-thumpers,” he said. (A Time magazine article from 1958 called it “a magazine dedicated to the proposition that authors are more interesting than critics.”)

There was something “secular,” Mr. Gourevitch said, about The Paris Review.

“You could pick up many issues without knowing what year they were from,” he said. “I mean, you could guess by certain kinds of aesthetic things—probably by the illustrations more than anything, and some texture of the prose—but you wouldn’t know that there was a civil rights movement or a Vietnam War or a decolonization of the world.”

The time, it would seem, is over for The Paris Review’s secular proclivities. But Mr. Gourevitch, whose own new book, out this spring, is about Abu Ghraib, with an accompanying documentary by the filmmaker Errol Morris, repulses the notion that his aim is simply to make the magazine more political.

“I don’t want pieces where you feel as though they’re trying to tell you how to think, or that there is a conclusion, so much as that there’s a kind of scrutiny, and that they are using writing as a way of reflecting on the world and seeing the world,” he said. “I feel like a lot of stuff we have now doesn’t do that, and that there’s actually a very open space for that. We are living in very twisted times, and people are, I think, unhappy about the way that they are getting told about it the whole time.”

And then some things stay the same. The Paris Review still offers possibly the most elite slush-pile-reading job in town.

“We want to see everything,” he said. “There is a notion out there, I think, that just getting people to read you is the hardest part. But really, writers want to find magazines and magazines want to find writers. I think it’s worth having four people reading 20,000 pieces a year, just so we can publish one of them. That’s what we’re here for.”

Mr. Gourevitch is continuing Plimpton’s tradition of publishing unknown writers alongside very famous ones; the new issue has short stories by Stephen King and Danielle Evans. (She’s never been published in a national magazine.)

And then there is the Paris Review Foundation, established to Plimpton’s own distaste to try to tap into his skill at cultivating long-term financial relationships with the city’s cultural power elite to stabilize the magazine’s resources.

The major fund-raising for the year takes place at the annual Revel, a springtime gala at which the magazine’s Plimpton prize (a $10,000 award for emerging writers, which this year went to the 28-year-old Benjamin Percy) and its Hadada prize (for established writers; this year’s went to Norman Mailer) are awarded, organized by the magazine’s development director, a new position under Mr. Gourevitch.

Tickets for the Revel, which this year was held at the Puck Building, start at $500; tables are $10,000 to $50,000; and this year’s event grossed $750,000—more than half of the magazine’s operating budget for the year.

Like any good philanthropic board, The Paris Review’s is comprised of the wealthy and/or well-connected.

The current members include New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers, who was one of the first nonfounders to join the magazine; Lawrence Guffey, who works in London for the Blackstone Group, the private equity firm founded by Steven Schwarzman; the private investor Scott Asen, whose college buddies at Harvard include former Massachusetts Governor William Weld; the artist and writer Bokara Legendre, the daughter of the late socialite Gertrude Legendre, whose family plantation, in South Carolina, has been the site of magazine retreats; and Allure contributing editor Jeanne McCulloch, who has written about her privileged childhood growing up on the Upper East Side for that magazine. The magazine’s publisher, Drue Heinz, was the second wife of the late Jack Heinz, who ran his family’s company from Pittsburgh and was the father of the late Senator John Heinz III.

Board member Thomas Guinzburg, one of the magazine’s original founders and the former president of the Viking Press and Viking Penguin, recently stepped down, and the screenwriter Stephen Gaghan (who is married to ubiquitous socialite Tinsley Mortimer’s sister-in-law Minnie Mortimer) and the author Clara Bingham will join the board as its newest members.

“We try to stay away from the editorial approach because we don’t think we should be meddling,” said board member James Goodale, a Debevoise & Plimpton lawyer who was a former counsel to The New York Times (and this newspaper). Mr. Goodale, who was Plimpton’s longtime lawyer, was also instrumental in establishing the Foundation. “George didn’t like the idea at all. He didn’t like it because in his view of history, there had never been a literary magazine that survived,” Mr. Goodale said.

The establishment of the Foundation presupposes the idea that on its own—or as a for-profit enterprise—a magazine like The Paris Review would not survive. “Literature is an art form that has gotten precious little philanthropic support,” said Mr. Asen, the board member. “There simply haven’t been the vehicles.”

And then, of course, Plimpton did not get to choose his successor.

“I don’t plan on dying in this job. George did it for 50 years, but he gave birth to it. I think that there is a lot that we could do with it, and it’s important to me that it’s read—the more people that read it the better.”

Herewith, an invitation to follow the pained thought process of B.E. when confronted with a new book by one of the few novelists he’s had hugely high hopes for: David Foster Wallace, the former wunderkind who in 1996 brought us the 1,079-page Infinite Jest.

A little background: The impossible, overwhelming, completely maddening Infinite Jest amazed B.E. and convinced him of Mr. Wallace’s genius. (Yes, he used that very word, and with only a trace of embarrassment and protective irony.) A collection of essays published a year later, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, confirmed B.E.’s belief that Mr. Wallace (b. 1962) was the most important writer of his generation. Next came a collection of stories, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), which was brilliant in spots and generally good enough to keep the flame burning. B.E. rattled off enthusiastic reviews, confident that Mr. Wallace was getting ready for another big (emotionally big) novel, a compelling narrative that would lead us all into the promised land of the intellectually satisfying post-ironic novel.

With Oblivion (2004), another book of stories, came the first doubts. B.E. was so conflicted, in fact, that he chickened out of writing a review: The weak stories outnumbered the strong, and even in the strong ones Mr. Wallace seemed to be jogging in place, content to dazzle us with his trademark stylistic quirks—abbreviations, acronyms, avalanche sentences, footnotes (but this time no footnotes to footnotes)—and the usual data dump of encyclopedic high/low cleverness.

And now, with Consider the Lobster—a collection of 10 essays, most of them mediocre, none of them first-rate—B.E. is in a jam. It’s easy to ignore a book of essays, especially if only four of them date from the last five years and a couple were written before the author’s previous collection (which means that back in 1997 they didn’t make the cut). But what does it say if B.E. skips two Wallace books in a row? Is he giving Mr. Wallace a break? Or is he sparing himself the unpleasant task of rethinking the former wunderkind’s status and maybe even stripping him of his most-important-writer-of-his-generation status? The underlying question, the question that B.E. would most like to dodge, is whether the next novel will disappoint as cruelly as these “new” essays.

Another problem: B.E. actually commissioned one of the essays in Consider the Lobster, a review of a dismal John Updike novel which ran in The Observer back in 1998. It’s not an essay that has stood the test of time; in fact, it flunks. The first sentence, which begins “Mailer, Updike, Roth—the Great Male Narcissists who’ve dominated postwar American fiction are now in their senescence,” makes B.E. cringe, if only because Mr. Roth has published four novels in the last seven years, not one of which is in any way symptomatic of senescence. On the contrary, two of those novels—The Human Stain (2000) and The Plot Against America (2004)—are wonderfully powerful; way better, it seems to B.E., than what Mr. Wallace has been showing us lately. Does B.E. really want to revisit that essay, and recall how the excitement of publishing a review by Mr. Wallace overrode his qualms about allowing his newspaper to announce the decline of a writer who has since consolidated his claim to pre-eminence?

B.E. is abashed. But he does what he hopes is the right thing. (You’re reading it.)

Consider the Lobster begins with a long account of a 1998 awards ceremony for adult videos—both boring and repellent, like porn itself. Held in Las Vegas, in a Caesar’s Palace ballroom, and sponsored by Adult Video News, the awards are the porn industry’s equivalent of the Oscars. In other words, the essay is Mr. Wallace’s chance to say something interesting about an industry (porn, not Hollywood) that rakes in billions of dollars and polarizes the nation. The best he does is buried in a footnote that stretches over two pages, in which he argues that the “psychodynamics of porn” depend on “a certain real degree of shame, self-loathing, perception of ‘sin,’ etc.” experienced “both on the performing end—‘I’m a nasty girl,’ ‘I’m a little fuckhole’—and on the consumption end.” The rest is numbingly detailed and oddly detached reportage. (Sending literary authors to report on porn was a mini-trend of the last decade: Martin Amis and George Plimpton covered the same beat.)

The porn essay, which appeared in Premiere—“bipseudonymously,” for unexplained reasons—is narrated by “your correspondents” (Mr. Wallace apparently brought along a friend). The awkward result is characteristic of the curious way he’s decided to handle his own inescapable presence in everything he writes: In three of the collection’s four long essays, he goes out of his way to banish the first-person singular. (The exception is an interminable review of Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage.)

When Mr. Wallace reports on the seven days he spent with the McCain campaign during the 2000 primaries (without, naturally, coming to any conclusion concerning Mr. McCain’s character), he assumes the identity of the magazine that hired him: He refers to himself throughout as “Rolling Stone,” or occasionally “RS.” In “Host,” a vivid Atlantic Monthly profile of radio talk-show host John Ziegler, Mr. Wallace is simply “Q”—as in Q&A.

This is not a strategy that necessarily diminishes authorial presence. In the McCain piece, “Rolling Stone” is so obviously and obtrusively a novice political journalist that he inspires a kind of down-home trust. In “Host,” Mr. Wallace does indeed recede—and Mr. Ziegler appears in sharp relief, a fascinating, deeply unsympathetic character, ferociously unwavering in his convictions. Only in the last sentence of the piece does Mr. Wallace speak in his own voice: “I’ll take doubt.”

(“Host,” by the way, is typographically experimental. Mr. Wallace has put his footnotes and his footnotes to footnotes in boxes and drawn arrows to link them to the text, so that the page looks as if a flowchart has invaded it. He may be making a point about the deep depths of writing—as opposed to the flat linearity of talk radio—but boy-oh-boy is it hard to read.)

Here’s what B.E. doesn’t understand about the elaborate lengths Mr. Wallace goes to in order to distance himself from conventional journalism: The best nonfiction he’s ever produced, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” the title essay of his first collection, established most delightfully—and indelibly, as far as B.E. is concerned—his anti-credentials as the anti-journalist. He was David Foster Wallace, assiduously unprofessional, bumbling about aboard a Caribbean cruise ship, and it was hilarious. I’ll take David.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

John Hodgman was drinking a smoothie inside the cavernous Galapagos Art Space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Soon the 32-year-old would switch to rye whiskey. It was 7:30 p.m., and the place was filling up with the 100 or so people Mr. Hodgman has met during his 10 years in New York City. In 2001, he began M.C.'ing these "Little Gray Book Lectures," which were inspired by the instructional pamphlets that were popular during the 1920's ("How to Seek Your Fortune," "How to Speak With Strangers," "What Will Happen in the Future?", "Europe vs. America") and which, on paper, sound exactly like the sort of self-consciously twee literary crap that Dave Eggers and McSweeney's have unintentionally spawned. The only thing is, the "Little Gray Book Lectures" are actually funny, and the vibe is surprisingly cozy. Mr. Hodgman's deadpan-but-warm manner-think Conan O'Brien in a camel-hair jacket-runs the show.

This night, he took the microphone and led the way through the night's acts: A GQ writer talked about foie gras and served some on paper plates. Jon Langford from the punk band the Mekons strapped on an electric guitar, reminisced about his art-school days in the 70's, and sang "Never Been in a Riot" and "I Love a Millionaire." Next up: an auction benefiting City Harvest-items included a mysterious typewriter, a headhunter statue and a case of whiskey. A video was played of bidders from past auctions giving wry I Love the 80's–style commentary about the items they'd bid on: recipes, a frying pan, a piano.

Mr. Hodgman's self-deprecating schtick brought the room into a warm, not-unpleasant haze of mutual admiration.

"He speaks in perfect sentences, and he had the dry, mature, man-in-a-smoking-jacket wit of an 80-year-old Oxford don when he was 25," said novelist Elizabeth Gilbert. "John pretends sometimes to be a cranky and grumpy person when he is actually compassionate and optimistic."

"John's events feature many of the same performers as from the hipster literary scene, but there's a much homier, warmer, more communal vibe," said writer Neal Pollack. "John is the real draw: He's a perfect host and a perfect gentleman."

"I was born at the age of about 45," Mr. Hodgman said. The only child of a businessman and a nurse in Brookline, Mass., young John had asthma and liked to watch Mary Tyler Moore and read Tintin books. "I was ruthlessly responsible and well-liked by all adults, which allowed me opportunity for subversion," he said. At Brookline High, he carried around a briefcase and co-edited a humor magazine that featured short stories about self-mutilation and X-rated comics.

At Yale, he took a class with literary critic Harold Bloom.

"As we all know, the man is a maniac," he said. "He has perhaps the largest brain on the planet …. It was really Bloom who taught me to be a comedian."

In the mid-1990's, Mr. Hodgman worked his way up to becoming a literary agent at Writers House. In 1997, George Plimpton edited a story of his for The Paris Review ("one of those life-altering moments"). In 2000, he turned most of his attention to writing, including a 13-part advice column on the McSweeney's Web site called "Ask the Former Professional Literary Agent."

Now he writes regularly for Men's Journal about booze and food, and occasionally for The New York Times Magazine. He recently sold a book, The Areas of My Expertise, which will be filled with "amazing historical true facts" (e.g., U.S. Presidents who had hooks for hands). "I would say the amount of true material is roughly zero," he added.

Of course, like Mr. Eggers, Mr. Hodgman is slowly acquiring fans-and literary fans, particularly those who flock to literary parties, rarely give their heroes a good name. Mr. Eggers wrote one terrific book and was so avidly embraced by horrid young hopefuls that one could make the case that we haven't caught a real glimpse of the writer since.

Fortunately, Mr. Hodgman lives on the Upper West Side with his wife of four years, Katherine Fletcher, who teaches English at Stuyvesant High School, and their daughter, whom he refers to as Hodgmina. "Since becoming a parent, I don't go out very much," he said.

Though, of course, there are exceptions.

Mr. Pollack recalled an evening when he and Mr. Hodgman gave a reading together. "It ended with us getting mauled by a woman in a bear costume," he said. "She couldn't see very well, so we had to keep throwing ourselves into her to allow the mauling to occur. Then we went out and got drunk, as is our wont-cocktail hour always starts early, and the cocktails are usually good. So his presence is warm and merry, but the next morning you curse him."

Mr. Hodgman wants to bring his "Little Gray Book Lectures" to radio.

"It needs to become something else," he said. "I think it's reached a very pleasant level of demi-quasi-notoriety within a small circle of people, but in order for it to be worth doing and creatively interesting, it has to grow and evolve."

Are his fans cult-like?

"Well, I hope that they would kill themselves if I asked them to," he said. "It's not a cult technically, but if I asked them to dress alike, I hope that they would. You know, I'm not doing this for nothing."

-George Gurley

They were proven wrong, of course, and now some are paying the price for their arrogance. But the real victims of the irrational exuberance of the 1990's are the low-wage, low-skills workers who have lost their jobs in the last few years. Their plight, invisible to so many of us, was documented in the government's most recent poverty figures. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the nation's poverty rate grew from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 12.1 percent last year. This means that 1.7 million more Americans fell below the poverty line last year. More than 34 million Americans are now classified as poor.

What's worse, the number of poor people may be underestimated. Because the Census Bureau's formula is based on consumption patterns that are scandalously out-of-date-the formula was devised in the early 1960's-the actual poverty rate may be closer to 15 percent.

These figures are troubling for several reasons. Most obviously, we are talking about our fellow citizens, many of whom share the American dream of a better life. We should also be concerned about the increase in poverty because it can lead to social unrest, racial tension and an increase in homelessness. It is neither just nor smart to sit idly by while millions of Americans conclude that they have no stake in society.

New York in particular, and urban America in general, experienced a glorious renaissance in the 1990's. Crime declined in record numbers-so much so that New York is now the safest big city in the country, and one of the safest big cities in the world. Businesses have rediscovered the convenience of the urban central business district, and urban pioneers have transformed neighborhoods left for dead in the 1970's.

Nobody would argue, however, that this revival marks a permanent or even a long-term change for the better in urban America. An increase in crime and unrest can-and likely will-send people packing in the blink of an eye. That's why the new poverty figures pose a threat to New York's future. We have worked too hard for too long to see the gains of the last decade disappear.

George Plimpton

The Manhattan literary landscape was forever altered last week when George Plimpton died in his East Side apartment at the age of 76. Throughout his long career as a writer, editor, mentor and raconteur, Plimpton created not just an admirable body of work-including over 30 books-but also a public persona which announced that the business of writing books need not be solitary or serious, but can be the adventure of a lifetime. The most startling fact of Plimpton's celebrity is that he pulled it off with tremendous grace and ease; it was impossible not to be charmed by the tall, patrician fellow with the impeccable accent and tailoring as he rode his bicycle to events at which other guests arrived by limousine. He remained delightfully free of the curdling ambition which spoils many New York writers, editors and agents.

Plimpton's madcap vision was as vast and startling as the city he was born in. Descendant of a Mayflower family, and son of one of the law partners of what is now Debevoise and Plimpton, young George Plimpton grew up in Manhattan's more rarefied circles, but he wore his breeding casually, letting everyone in on the joke. He attended all the right schools-Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard and Cambridge-and in 1953 became editor of The Paris Review , where he published the fiction of Philip Roth, Italo Calvino, V.S. Naipaul and many others, as well as long, much-discussed interviews with authors like Isaac Bashevis Singer and Ernest Hemingway. While editing the world's most famous literary magazine, Plimpton also perfected the form of "participatory" journalism. He boxed against Archie Moore, pitched in a Major League Baseball game, teed off with Arnold Palmer, played quarterback with the Detroit Lions and traded serves with Pancho Gonzalez. He was, of course, an abysmal failure in such contests, but his ability to write about the experience allowed him to say something profound about the nature of human endeavor. Indeed, even a writer as competitive as Hemingway raved about Plimpton's work.

When Plimpton had time to do all that writing is anyone's guess: he turned his Manhattan apartment into a salon, where the city's most notable writers and aspirants took the measure of the room and each other. By gathering so many of New York's bloodthirsty literary set in one place, Plimpton was no doubt making some mischief. But he liked fireworks-literally: He helped organize the massive fireworks display celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge.

New Yorkers were shocked when news came of Plimpton's death. His energy was so unflagging, his enthusiasms so outsized, the show surely couldn't be over. But he leaves behind him a most unique career in modern letters, and a magazine which this month will celebrate its 50th anniversary in his absence. The Observer extends our condolences to George Plimpton's wife, Sarah, and his children, Medora, Taylor, Laura and Olivia.

Shanah Tovah

Each year, the High Holy Days offer an opportunity for those of the Jewish faith to offer heartfelt prayers, reflect deeply and take stock of their lives. From the call of the shofar, the ram's horn blown to herald Rosh Hashanah, to the emotional, mournful and beautiful Kol Nidre service on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, it is a time of faith and family, self-reflection and forgiveness.

The Jewish community in the United States will especially take time to consider the plight of Israel today. Those living in the Middle East have barely healed from one attack when another follows in its terrible wake. Americans have a profound connection to Israel; it is, if anyone needed reminding, the only democratic government in the entire Middle East. While it has perhaps become difficult to imagine a lasting peace, one must do so to deny victory to the terrorists and those bent on violence. This year, the emergence of anti-Semitism in parts of Western Europe is another dark cloud in the New Year sky. It is especially troubling to see anti-Semitism on college campuses in the United States.

But the power of faith and prayer is great. As families gather in New York to celebrate new beginnings and symbolically cast sins into the water, may all New Yorkers join in the spirit of renewal.

In those summer mornings, the managing editor, Molly McKaughan, all bustle and energy, opened the office. Next came the three editorial assistants; one with a desk (Jannika Hurwitt), one with a rolling chair (Lucas Matthiessen) and one perched uncertainly between the tiny bathroom, the front door, and the sliver of a storage room (me). I came in one morning to find a rat swimming in the office toilet, which caused hardly any commotion, it turned out, so unflappable was the staff of George Plimpton's literary magazine.

By mid-morning, George showed up, looking surprised and amused to find us there: still at work, or at work already. He himself was half-dressed; pale blue Brooks Brothers boxers and a hastily buttoned dress shirt, his hair a mop of semi-tarnished silver, his nose, like the beak of wading bird, rising as he peered into the office with furrowed forehead. The idea was that he, too, should already be hard at work, but, alas, here he was, just another boyish Upper East Side WASP male in stocking feet, guiltily retrieving the morning paper from the vestibule instead of getting down to work the bank.

His editor's armchair was wedged alongside a windowsill and a covered radiator that was piled with months-old manuscripts and correspondence awaiting his approval. "Swamped" was the word always used to describe George's schedule; agents and writers demanding final word on a story would be told that George had been swamped, which meant that he was off earning his living by stalking the Imperial Ivory-Billed Woodpecker for Life , or covering the Harvard-Yale game for Sports Illustrated , or managing the Yankees in an exhibition game against the Dodgers at spring training in Florida. The heyday of his participatory journalism was just passing, and putting in a few hours a day as "GAP"--the monogram he always used when marking himself as editor of the literary magazine he had founded in Paris in the summer of 1953 with Peter Matthiessen (fiction editor), Thomas H. Guinzburg (managing editor), William Pène du Bois (art), Donald Hall (poetry), John P. C. Train (business manager), and Harold L. (Doc) Humes and William Styron (advisory editors)--was both his longest-running gig and among the most important achievements of his career.

Half-dressed George would fold himself into his armchair, gloomily pulling on his glasses to look at the topmost query on the pile. Almost immediately a phone would ring, but no one would answer it-it was the Plimptons' private line. After an interval the intercom would buzz from upstairs, and George would be needed on that line. George's voice heard up close for the first time in a quiet room made you complicit in a strange phenomenon. Was he serious? "No one who talked the way George did could ever be serious," the poet Donald Hall recalled thinking when he first met Plimpton in the '50s. Where was that Brahmin drawl from? Kurt Vonnegut called it a "honk"; it was thought to be "British." George himself described it as "Eastern Seaboard cosmopolitan." What people didn't understand was that although it was not a put-on, Plimpton's accent had a playful aspect that took some getting used to. As a boy, George had attended St. Bernard's, a Manhattan private school with a English character. I used to think of George's voice as a headmasterly tone that he had learned at St. Bernard's. George, a winner, also had a mocking notion of victory, and there frequently was not a little self-amused irony in his cool patrician tone.

In any case, he made deliberate use of his voice, and what he most often did with it-at least when he was feeling generous-was to make you an intimate by letting you in on the joke. The joke was that stuffy as he sounded, George Plimpton had in fact made a career by taking stands against the professionalism and adultism that was the bane of his generation. He had started by being suspended from Phillips Exeter Academy in the '40s. Like his friend Jack Kennedy (suspended from Choate in the '30s), Plimpton profoundly disbelieved what the brass had said in the war and what the suits were saying in the 1950s. In private, of course, J.F.K. was a cool, ironic, mocking Irishman. Plimpton was, among the first to use in public the cool voice of sardonic distance.

He triumphed uniquely in this because his career was founded on the expectation that he was not in the end going to win. He did hard work and made it look easy. He had the ability to impart lightness in the form of a touch of self-amusement. He had both the courage to enter worlds where well-trained professionals risked blood and guts and the wit to look at their struggles with the kind of bemusement that puts life itself into perspective. He stepped into the boxing ring with the light heavyweight champion Archie Moore, took the mound as a major league pitcher, and sauntered onto the field as the third-string quarterback for the Detroit Lions-all at a time when sports were becoming increasingly professional and obsessive. Plimpton single-handedly returned sports to pure pleasure, but with a twist, and with hard work.

The twist was in his generous fascination with the way people did things. In a culture that cares more for who people are than for what they do and how they do it, George peered curiously, and with great respect, into the way the game was played. He conveyed the work that went into the game. He revealed both to the players he played with and the readers reading him a new idea in American sports writing: Winners rarely feel like winners. Victory is what the onlooker feels, not the participant. From his vantage point inside the game, Plimpton could see that triumph was expressed not by the exhausted warriors but by their spear-carriers, the fans. Victory had become something to go out to the stadium to see, no longer earned only on the field. His work conveyed, above all, an almost melancholy sense of the price paid by the man in the dust of the arena.

What Plimpton's work was also about was the creation of a character-not an Everyman, or a Walter Mitty, as Hemingway mistakenly had it. George's gift was to have in his genes the capacity for pure enjoyment-the ideal of the gentleman sportsman. George loved his work so intensely you got the impression that he would have paid to do these things (as rich men can now pay to become amateur astronauts). He could afford to be in the position of the admiring amateur, not for financial reasons but because playing at a game didn't compromise his position: he worked too hard for that, and he was already too comfortable in his own skin. "I never had the temerity to pretend I was something that I wasn't," he wrote in Paper Lion . Temerity had nothing to do with it.

His model for participatory journalism was Paul Gallico, a 1921 graduate of Columbia University, who had been reviewing movies for the New York Daily News , when he persuaded Jack Dempsey to spar with him. Gallico had an almost scientific interest in what it would feel like to be hit by the world heavyweight champion. Gallico, knocked out in two minutes, got up, pulled himself together, wrote his story, and went on to become the best-known sports writer in America. Gallico was all about striving; George Plimpton was already where he wanted to be. But because he came from a higher world, and because he worked hard, he elevated the thing admired, which was the professional player of the game.

Journalism set Plimpton apart, and therefore placed him in his natural element, which was to be isolated and alone even among a crowd of people. Of all the things George Plimpton did, and the Paris Review office was nothing if not a living museum of the artifacts of a singular career, the magazine itself was always closest to his heart. "I would feel that a limb had been amputated," he once confided, "if The Paris Review stopped."

Once, in 1960, it almost had. After 25 issues, the editors, now in their thirties, with careers and families, met in New York to decide the magazine's future. Matthiessen and Guinzburg had both moved on to newer projects and voted for closing down The Paris Review . Plimpton, still the editor, was held to account for the lateness of issues and general inefficiency. For his part, George was frustrated and angry at having been abandoned by the other founding editors; he wanted everyone to stay on and work harder. Factions formed, tempers flared, everyone had too much to drink. Finally the poetry editor, Donald Hall, soothed the room with a speech about the magazine's first principles. George, left with the choice to shut the shop or carry on alone with new talent, credited Hall as "the man who saved The Paris Review ." But it was Hall who got closer to the truth that defined Plimpton's whole life: "George never gives up on anyone."

During his first phone conversation of the morning, a second outside line would ring-this one dedicated to the editorial office-and after the usual confusion about the Paris Review no longer being headquartered in Paris but on East 72nd Street but also at 45-39 171 Place in Flushing (where Lillian von Nickern, a stalwart of the ages, served as business manager), a third line would light up-George's private office line.

George was a man of many orbits. The voices on his line seemed to come from lives that functioned as satellites positioned in geostationary orbit around the World of Plimpton. To be a summer intern entrusted to answer the private line was to have an ear to the training camp of the world heavyweight boxing champion, the upper reaches of New York publishing, the scattered membership of the Maidstone, Knickerbocker, and Porcellian clubs, the New York City of the late Ford administration, a still-optimistic city being saved by Felix Rohatyn and polished by Lauren Bacall and Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Ashe and Jacqueline Onassis and Clay Felker and Saul Steinberg and Howard Cosell and Truman Capote and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and William Shawn and Bobby Short.

George's belief in human resilience was the magic thread that wove together all those lives.

Everything and everybody in his life was for the purpose of making work into play and play into work. The world always supposed that George Ames Plimpton was swimming in what was then called Old Money. In fact, George lived within the limits of his income as a working journalist. People never believed it. The basic put-down of Plimpton was that he was nothing more, really, than Bertie Wooster, P.G. Wodehouse's adventuring moneyed fop. But, remember: the singular nature of Bertie is that without Jeeves, he wouldn't survive a day on the streets of New York, let alone in the percussion section of the New York Philharmonic. George could take care of himself. In the end, he was hard core.

His father, Francis T. P. Plimpton, a corporate lawyer, a quintessentially practical Yankee in pinstripes, was amused by a son who dared to climb down out of the seats in Yankee Stadium and pitch to a post-season team of major-league all-stars. That he also got Willie Mays to pop up before collapsing from exhaustion was the Plimpton in him. Father was fond of son. At the same time, Francis appeared to be puzzled at what kind of bird he'd hatched in his New England nest on Manhattan's Upper East Side. In the father-son tug of war, one sensed the greater tension on the father's side: Francis may have been a bit hurt, finally, at being George Plimpton's father and not one of the legendary founding figures at the firm that became Debevoise & Plimpton. George was the middle child, wedged between a charming older brother, Oakes Ames Plimpton, and a artistic younger sister, Sarah Ames Plimpton. But to their mother, the former Pauline Ames, daughter of Oakes Ames, director of Harvard's Botanical Museum, and Blanche Ames Ames, a woman's rights activist who invented an early formula for spermicide as well as a method for using a canning jar sealing ring as a diaphragm, George was the son who drove all the stars out of the sky.

Mrs. Plimpton was a formidable presence in George's life. In The Paris Review 's many editorial offices going back to 1953 and the boardroom in the basement of Les Editions de la Table Ronde on the rue Garancière, the phrase "George's mother" was said to have had a correcting effect on otherwise reckless young men. On one occasion in the winter of 1953, George's mother telephoned Thomas H. Guinzburg, then serving as the magazine's New York editor. Mrs. Plimpton had taken exception to a story in the fourth issue about a grotesquely fat, drug-addicted 19-year-old boy, "The Sleep of Baby Filbertson," by James Leo Herlihy (later to write Midnight Cowboy ). "Tom," said Mrs. Plimpton, "how did you, as head of the New York office, allow that story to go in?" Guinzburg replied that George made all those decisions, in Paris. Mrs. Plimpton considered for a moment, then said, "Well, I'm quite sure he didn't intend it to appear in the Christmas issue."

George took it for granted that he was welcome anywhere, as his Ames ancestors had (not quite) been. George's great-great grandfather Benjamin Franklin Butler (1818-1893), governor of Massachusetts and Greenback-Labor candidate for President of the United States in 1884, made himself at home during the Civil War as the administrator of New Orleans, collecting taxes, seizing local bullion, and spending money without federal approval. George's great-grandfather Adelbert Ames (1835-1933) was elected by carpetbaggers during Reconstruction as governor of Mississippi, then U. S. senator. Ames, the youngest major-general in the Civil War was celebrated sixty-eight years after Appomattox as its last surviving general; he also had a talent for inventing mechanical things, from pencil sharpeners to fire-engine ladders. George, born in 1927, remembered him well. George's maternal grandmother, Blanche A. Ames, a women's rights activist, had patents on a hexagonal lumber cutter (1939), a system for trapping low-flying aircraft (1945), and an anti-pollution device for toilets (1968).

George invented himself. In Paris at the age of 26, he still, however, had no idea what he would do with his life. He thought maybe he would come home and get involved in television, the coming thing. Then he stumbled on his first real invention, "the Paris Review interview."

George and the other editors created an alternative to criticism. They let the authors talk about their work themselves. The Paris Review 's first issue featured an interview with E.M. Forster, in which the old King's College don de-mystified the Malabar Caves scene in A Passage to India by revealing that he had consciously created it as a substitute for violence. The Paris Review interviews, Writers at Work , are the indispensable companion to postwar world literature. Plimpton, who interviewed Ernest Hemingway for issue no. 18, thus made an art form of going to writers better than he and talking about what it was really like to write. There, in other words was the template for his whole career as interested participant on center court at Wimbledon or at the 18th hole at the U. S. Open or in the backfield of the Detroit Lions football team.

Plimpton's generation was guilty about taking play so seriously. In Paper Lion , preparing himself for the Detroit Lions training camp, he trots off to Central Park to toss a football around. The mood is melancholy as Plimpton discovers that on weekdays in the city, "with friends working in their offices, it was difficult finding someone with whom to throw." Out of step with his conventional contemporaries, it's up to Plimpton to make the study of play fascinating enough to distract them from their responsibilities.

There was a degree of guilt always in the background of George's life-guilt at being so fascinated by games and personalities, guilt at not being a man who earned his living at a firm, guilt at being the last of the red-hot bachelors. He dealt first with his guilt by concealing how hard he worked. He could never have resolved having such a good time if he couldn't tell himself that playing tennis with Pancho Gonzalez was hard work.

As with so many things in his life the New York of the 1960's and of his prime was the sunlit city of pretty girls in their summer dresses, he seemed merely amused by pretty girls: he concealed how hard he had taken it when the love of his youth jilted him. The story was allowed to show its nose, but that was all: at Harvard, a faun-like Radcliffe girl named Bea was smart, with a purpose in life besides getting a man. The romance was serious on both sides, but Bea was cautious-perhaps she could see that being married to this young man was a career in itself-and turned George down.

He appeared to take the comic mask as his cover, but in fact he had a strong tragic element. In the blast of a coach's whistle gathering players together at the end of Paper Lion , he could hear "the long bleat...almost one of sorrow." He could "see the girls with their racquets on the tennis court, the sound [of the whistle] catching them in lovely poses of arrest, the bells of hair turning at their shoulders as they stopped their play to turn and listen, peering at the pines, their heads tilted for the sounds drifting up from the practice field beyond." He believed that the world was a sad place, but you had to work at it to avoid sorrow. This more than anything made him kind and sparing and merciful.

He could be the testy Yankee in private but never in public or at parties. The George who peeled away pretense did it in small groups. His books are a liberal education. George's classic bestsellers about the world of professional baseball, football, golf, football (again), boxing- Out of My League , Paper Lion , The Bogey Man , Mad Ducks and Bears , Shadow Box --are not adventures among inarticulate oafs. His amazing illusionist trick was to let the Detroit Lions be articulate, even as he skewered his own intelligence. It remains one of the great trompe l'oeil achievements of postwar American literature.

His prose style-the artless, nonchalant voice of his reporting, the ironist always at work-was one of his great contributions. He was the gentleman out of his depth who remained a gentleman. The 1960s in Manhattan had been the last hurrah for the world George had come from, and he brought the dignity of a real citizen of the world to his grass-stained, blood-trickling transactions in the arena. As time went on, and entertainment took over the world, Plimpton was not needed in quite the same way. But he was still the man who conferred upon our newer world a touch of anthropology and a dash of boyish charm; the mixture still worked through the '80s and '90s: If George Plimpton could be fascinated by fireworks or snakes or whatever, no one else need be embarrassed by it.

He was a celebrity in a minor key. He was famous in a gentlemanly way. He was criticized for being a publicity hound, but in fact, though George loved being famous and worked very hard at it, he never opened the windows on his private life. He never alluded to his childhood, or to episodes of personal pain. He was always George Plimpton, Amateur, and he lived in a world in which painful passions do not exist on the page.

In the end, the cold New England eye was outweighed by his kindness, the kindness that is emphasized along with inventiveness in the biographies of his Calvinist ancestors. He aroused astonishing loyalty. He was a chaplain to the newly arrived among the bright lights of the big city, as well as to all those lost people who had worked hard and still wondered what it was all about. How was it that someone who worked so hard at not being taken seriously aroused such serious loyalty?

He was no Gatsby. He could be wistful, with a tragic look in his eye, and he had his Daisy, and God knows we all went to his parties, but he was not a self-made man. He was, instead, something new in the Republic: a self-unmaking man. But time after time, he came back with one more triumph. How did he do it? He did it with a concealment that is the concealment of intense art. His was not just gentlemanly understatement. Self-deprecation was for the club. Hemingway didn't invent grace under pressure; it was invented by George's gentleman ancestors. George Plimpton's profession, finally, was to be unique; to be George Plimpton, the one and only. No one in the last fifty years of American life has been a professional gentleman in quite the way Plimpton pulled it off. By his early forties, he had established a national reputation. He was never diluted by imitators, and his eye and his "I" never clouded over with the kind of self-parody that finally put cataracts on Mailer's journalism. He went on to his dying day without a single encroacher--in a country of 300 million people. There were thousands of would-be Woodward-and-Bernsteins; hundreds of Tom Wolfe wannabes; numberless phony Hunter Thompsons. But only one George Plimpton.

He was a Yankee to the end. But he could never have been himself in New England. Just as Henry Adams had to go to Washington, D. C., to carry off being Henry Adams, so George had to live his life in Manhattan. To be a hard-working Yankee and carry it off in high style, one perched alongside the East River and worked one's ass off, while of course never being so crass as to say one was working at it.

George talked incessantly about money. Money was a routine topic of conversation in The Paris Review 's editorial office-a surprise to me, at eighteen. In my own middle-class family, the subject of money was an embarrassment. George had an aristocratic unembarrassment about money.

His concern about money centered always around the baby he'd fathered in Paris and been stuck with by his fellow founders. He worried, perhaps, again, out of guilt: George always knew that of all the choices in his life, the "most sensible one," he once told me, "would be to drop The Paris Review ." But he didn't, and from the moment he tapped Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, his Harvard roommate, to be the Paris Review 's first publisher while they were running the bulls in Pamplona, to the somewhat less glamorous but no less loyal publishers of the 1970s (Ron Dante, the music producer and creator of the Archies; Bernard F. Connors, the Canadian soft-drink king), to the creation in the 1990s of a sensibly endowed Paris Review Foundation, fundraising was foremost on his mind.

Money is the key theme--dignity the dominant gift conferred--in his final note to subscribers. It arrived the week before his death as a small printed insert accompanying the dazzlingly chic invitation to the magazine's gala fiftieth anniversary revels. Under The Paris Review 's insignia-talon-gripped dip pen and liberty cap with tricolore cockade-George took note of the fact that the party on October 14 was going to be, in fact, a fund-raiser and that, for some, the ticket prices would be "relatively high." Was George taking pity on the poor subscriber in Kansas City, Kansas, because the cheapest seat would be $500 and it's a long way to New York? Well, no, probably not--but he wanted us all to know that we were welcome, and he turned what might be seen as condescension into a high compliment: "We tend to think of our subscribers as those we would like to have with us at such an occasion and thus the invitation." And having done the cosmopolitan thing, he then wastes no more time before pointing out that if you happen to be unable to come, you still have several options: You might like to make a contribution to the Paris Review Foundation; or simply buy an extra subscription for a friend through The Review 's new Web site; or--the purest of Plimptonian salutes--"simply raise a glass on the 14th of October." He signs off in even purer faith, a classically wistful sounding Plimpton promise: "In any case, the fiftieth anniversary issue will be reaching you next month."

They're 50! And they love it! They love it, they love it, they love it! (Pardon us-sharp pang of missing Molly Shannon , who was the best thing about NBC's Saturday Night Live and then just kind of disappeared, as funny women from that show have a rather ominous way of doing.) Anyway, More magazine, the thinking woman's Modern Maturity , is co-hosting a launch party for 50 Celebrate 50 , a book featuring glam boomers like slippery TV anchor Diane Sawyer , actresses Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep , singer Donna Summer and the ubiquitous Susan Sarandon , who will also pass out some awards on behalf of a charitable organization called Help a Parent, Save a Child , as is her wont …. Meanwhile, a whole bunch of other fiftysomethings -already steamed about the recent Winter Antiques Show being moved from an armory to the plebeian Hilton-were in a panic about this year's Art Show being staged at the wall-to-wall-carpeted Jacob Javits Center. But luckily, at press time, the Art Show (which has loot like a nice 1932 Frida Kahlo watercolor of Belvedere Castle) had been moved back to an armory …. Phew . Tonight, a gala benefit preview benefits the Henry Street Settlement-and Tom Brokaw , who doesn't look a shade over 50, is coming!

[ More party, Puck Building, 295 Lafayette Street, 6:30 p.m. cocktails, awards and "entertainment" to follow, 455-1030; Art Show, Seventh Regiment Armory, Park Avenue and 67th Street, 5:30 p.m., 766-9200.]

Thursday 21st

It's just another lunch in the Condé Nast cafeteria : tuna salad, coupla Rice Krispies treats , and suddenly it's 3:45 p.m. and you're flinging butter pats at James Truman -except today you can take the elevator up ( swooooosh , those ears are poppin' ! ) to the 20th floor of the building for the opening reception of The Meaning of Time: The New Yorker in the City , an art exhibit curated by New Yorker legend and long-limbed bon vivant C.S. Ledbetter , who can still tell ribald stories from the William Shawn era …. Meanwhile, the Armory Show , a fair of "modern" art, opens today-except, confusingly, not in an actual armory (that spot was swiped by the Art Show, yesterday), but in good old smelly Hell's Kitchen . Tonight's gala preview benefits the Museum of Modern Art . Bring a cookie.

[Meaning of Time, New Yorker Gallery, 4 Times Square, 20th floor, 4 p.m., supposedly by invitation only, 286-5593; Armory Show, 12th Avenue at 48th and 50th streets, 4:30 p.m., 708-9680.]

"Where do I start?!" said Laurie Benoit, 25, who is training to be a Pilates instructor , but is also a member of a new "choreographic collective" called the Varoom Group that stages its dubiously titled debut, Sometimes It Goes Whoosh , tonight. " It's definitely a 'downtown' dance aesthetic : There's a lot of lifting, a little bit like ice skating," she said, gamely attempting the Olympics tie-in. No nudity-the girls wear sundresses and overalls. " There are five of us-we're all about 25 , four of us went to Connecticut College . We've been here for like three years and taking dance classes and just decided it was time to get out there ." As part of the show, Ms. Benoit choreographed her own piece, Half a Mile Back , to bluegrass music. "I started out with the idea of a game of leapfrog-the idea that you step on other people, and you jump over them and push to the front of the line, but you always find yourself at the back of the line." Welcome to New York , honey …. Meanwhile, in the continuing and disturbing trend of teen magazines being the only publications in this city to really whoop it up, YM 's editor in chief, Christina Kelly (another alum of Sassy ), fêtes the April MTV issue with one-named song temptresses Pink and Shakira at the Whiskey. Burp !

[Varoom, University Settlement, 184 Eldridge Street, 8 p.m., 718-282-7283; YM , the Whiskey, 1567 Broadway, 7 p.m., by invitation only, 646-758-0810.]

Fashion Week aftershock! French designer Pierre Cardin -who has been in the biz for, like, 50 years and is just experiencing a resurgence after totally overlicensing his name in the cheapo 70's -flies in from Paris with a couple of D.J.'s named Albert and Felix and hosts a big, sweaty dance party at Maxim's de Paris, which has gone the way of Starbucks, Pottery Barn, Putumayo et al. and pressed a music-compilation CD. Crash strategy: wear a silly little newsboy cap and "les sneakers."

[680 Madison Avenue, 9 p.m., by invitation only, 228-5555.]

Friday 22nd

Green or Greenwich? The Eight-Day Week has what is known as a "black thumb," and every time our Precious goes away on a business trip, his homegrown basil dies a slow death. But we hear that "in the wake of Sept. 11," a lot of people have embraced Real Simple magazine, chenille and gardening …. Today, at the Gramercy Garden Antiques Show in yet another armory, there will be plants, planters, flowers, pots, fountains, ironwork gazebos and topiary aplenty . Meanwhile, at the Greenwich Village Antiquarian Book Fair : out-of-print books, maps, prints, paper ephemera. Is it just us, or has the tchotchke density of this town reached total critical mass this week? Later, young Upper East Side women with ample leisure time-Marina Rust Connor, Nathalie Gerschel Kaplan, Lauren duPont and Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer -chair a Fête des Quatre Saisons at the friendly Frick . It's black tie, with "seasonal accents," which means the girls will be weaving flowers into their hair and stuff. Real simple, as they say.

[Gramercy Garden Antiques Show, 69th Regiment Armory, Lexington Avenue at 26th Street, 11 a.m., 255-0020; Antiquarian Book Fair, 490 Hudson Street, 6 p.m., 675-815; Fête des Quatre Saisons , Frick, 1 East 70th Street, 8:30 p.m., 547-0707.]

Saturday 23rd

Are Saturdays back? Who knows? Tonight the Manhattan Society is having a casino basheroo benefit, " A Masquerade for Multiple Sclerosis ." What it'll cost ya: $150. Celebrity wattage : Andrea Plummer, Miss New York State 2001. Meanwhile, the Kristen Ann Carr Fund has a semi-formal to help cure sarcoma. What it'll cost ya: $120. Celebrity wattage : "Well, Bruce Springsteen has been known to go; I don't know about this year," said a publicist. We'll hold out for Clarence Clemons!

[Manhattan Society Masquerade for M.S., Marriott Marquis, 1535 Broadway, 8:30 p.m., 463-7787, ext. 3030; Kristen Ann Carr Fund Winter Semi-Formal, 200 Fifth Club, 200 Fifth Avenue, 9 p.m., 675-2080.]

Sunday 24th

Helen Mirren chills out …. Exactly one month till the most dismayingly mediocre Oscars we can remember- Moulin Rouge nominated for Best Picture ? Ethan Hawke for Best Supporting Actor? … One lone bright spot is Helen Mirren's nomination for the pretty if sort of tedious Gosford Park . Ms. Mirren was in town to promote her new film, Last Orders . What does she do to escape? we asked. " Daytime television . Love Judge Judy . Love Judge Hackett. I love all the judges , very into the judges. I even watch repeats of ones I've already seen. That's pathetic, isn't it? " Does she ever pray? "I do pray, although I don't believe in God, so it's kind of pathetic, really." What does she drink? " I drink vodka usually. Sometimes a shot, sometimes a Sea Breeze, sometimes a Cosmopolitan. Tonight I'll probably chill a bit, but I want to chill big time ."

[777-FILM.]

Monday 25th

More matrons! It's the big Drama League dinner honoring gossip columnist Liz Smith -think Friars Club Roast, but with lots of beaded jackets and Christine Baranski . We're under strict orders to keep the rest of the participants top-secret so that Ms. Smith will be "surprised," but we can tell you that upon hearing Elaine Stritch will M.C., our big-cheese editor picked up the phone and ordered a corsage.

[Pierre Hotel, 2 East 61st Street, 7:30 p.m., cocktails, dinner and show to follow, 861-8690.]

Tuesday 26th

Ted Zagat alert! The babelicious, albeit slightly "manorexic" son of Tim and Nina-a 27-year-old Harvard grad who as of this writing is still up for grabs, ladies -is on the junior committee of tonight's Careers Through Culinary Arts Program benefit honoring Jacques Pépin. We hear from one who's seen young Ted on the town that, like Helen Mirren, his preferred libation is vodka. Straight. Got that, ladies?

[Pier 60, Chelsea Piers, 6 p.m., 718-279-0331.]

Book-party bingo: It's not the first time cranky Harper's editor Lewis Lapham and pink-cheeked Paris Review editor George Plimpton have gone head-to-head, but it may well be the ugliest. Uptown , Mr. Plimpton opens his home so his young editorial-assistant minxes can clomp around in clogs and lay out the Gouda for a passel of Dutch authors: Oscar van den Boogaard, Hugo Claus, Margriet de Moor, Arnon Grunberg, Marcel Moring, Cees Nooteboom, Maya Rasker, Hans Maarten van den Brink and Henk van Woerden , who have all been specially flown in (flap, flap, flap) from Holland to boost U.S. awareness of the Dutch literati …. Downtown , Harper's contributing editor Vince Passaro celebrates his first novel, Violence, Nudity, Adult Content .

[Dutch author party, at George Plimpton's Upper East Side apartment, we can't tell you exactly where, 5:30 p.m., by invitation only, 246-1430, ext. 209; Vince Passaro, Housing Works Used Book Cafe, 126 Crosby Street, by invitation only, 7 p.m., 420-5779.]

Wednesday 27th

New playwrights are poking their heads forth like the hopeful buds of spring …. Take The Allegory of Golf , by Wade Gasque - please ! The plot: middle-aged widow comes home to find neighbor's daughter hiding in her kitchen; the two hop in a car to California and discuss Ayn Rand . Or there's Room 314 , by Michael Knowles . The plot: Six couples spend time in one hotel room and wrestle with relationships, commitment and identity-alas, not all at the same time. Stay home and work on your garden.

[ The Allegory of Golf , Flatiron Playhouse, 119 West 23rd Street, 8 p.m., 340-1359; Room 314 , Paradise Theater Company, 64 East Fourth Street, 8 p.m., 726-1310.]

My friend Bill (not his real name) and I wanted to write a story about Jenna Jameson, the adult-film star. So one afternoon we telephoned Ms. Jameson's publicist, who suggested that we meet her client and screen Jenna's latest film, Dream Quest . That sounded like a pretty good idea. But a screening room wasn't immediately available, so Ms. Jameson's publicist suggested that Jenna could come over to one of our apartments. That sounded like a really good idea.

Then we began to worry. How does one host an adult-film star?

We chose Bill's apartment in Brooklyn, since it is bigger than mine. The night before Ms. Jameson was to come over, Bill had his place professionally cleaned. Bill is married, and he doesn't even do that for his in-laws.

Then we had to decide what to wear. I wanted to look cool for Ms. Jameson, but I didn't want to look as if I were auditioning for a part in her next film. I picked a pair of tight green suede pants, black boots and a sleeveless black turtleneck. (When I'm nervous I always wear a sleeveless top, in case I sweat.) My friend Louisa, whom I invited to join us, decided to wear pleather pants and a red blouse. Bill picked out a pair of ties and asked us to help him select the most appropriate one.

Food was another concern. Part of me wanted to serve nothing but cream-filled foods: Twinkies, Ding-Dongs, ravioli. That was too cute. I also considered bananas, cucumbers and Popsicles. Too obvious. We decided to just stock the fridge with beer and wine and order take-out when Jenna arrived. I also brought a bunch of biscotti made by my 93-year-old grandmother.

On the big night, we hired two cars to bring us to Bill's place. We picked Ms. Jameson up at her hotel in midtown. Like a lot of stars, she is much shorter in person and much skinnier, too. She was wearing tight black jeans, a "Playboy 55" T-shirt and a red jean jacket. She was with her assistant, Traci. Traci, a former masseuse, refers to herself as "Jenna's bitch."

We arrived at Bill's apartment 20 minutes later. Once inside, Ms. Jameson lit a Capri cigarette and slouched on the couch alongside Traci. She took out two cell phones and a BlackBerry pager and put them on Bill's coffee table. One of the cell phones was for business, Ms. Jameson explained, and the other was for "booty calls."

I took a seat next to Jenna and offered her one of my grandmother's biscotti. She took one. Then we all started talking. The conversation quickly turned into frank girl talk: We talked about menstruation, about penis size, about embarrassing noises during sex. It felt both naughty and strangely comfortable. Ms. Jameson talked about her technique for oral sex. Her secret is lots of saliva. In fact, Ms. Jameson said she was thinking of bottling and selling her saliva.

Then the phone rang. Bill picked it up. It was his pregnant wife, Natalie, calling from an airport in Seattle. "I hope you're having fun at your porn party," Natalie said before she slammed down the phone.

We decided to order dinner. We ordered sushi, which triggered some snickering. "Ohhhh yeah, sushi! Sushi girls, uh-huh," Ms. Jameson sang.

Then we popped Dream Quest into Bill's VCR. There was a lot of nervous laughing and giggling. Every time a sex scene would come up, Ms. Jameson would shriek, "Ohhhh, yeah! Wa-waw, bomp chicka bomp bomp, wa-waw." She also kept up a running commentary through the film, telling us who wasn't nice on the set and who wasn't particularly well-endowed.

For a while it was exciting, and definitely surreal. Then I got kind of bored. Having an adult-film star at your house was like visiting Amsterdam for the first time. At first you're giddy and you can't believe it. Then it gets to be too much and you long for something safe and warm, like bunny slippers.

At the end of the movie, we had Jenna sign our copies of Dream Quest . We posed for photos. Then we called Jenna and Traci a cab, walked them to the door and said goodnight.

–Christina Valhouli

Chelsea's R.V. Cowboy

James Chrystie drives a 1982 AirStream 310 that he bought off an old lady in upstate New York for $20,000 four years ago. It's your classic R.V.: gas range, queen-sized bed, couch, toilet, satellite TV, shower, auto-leveler, hydraulic jacks, CB radio, eight-foot awning. Thirty-one feet long, it's the same rig that NASA uses to shuttle astronauts to the launch pad.

"It's white trash," Mr. Chrystie said over a buffalo burger on a recent afternoon at Heartland Brewery on Union Square. "But it's the best of white trash–a beautiful monstrosity."

What's more impressive than the AirStream's accoutrements, however, is the fact that Mr. Chrystie always manages to find a free parking space–or rather, three free parking spaces–for his beautiful monstrosity on West 16th Street and Eighth Avenue, where he keeps an apartment.

"I always get a space," Mr. Chrystie said blithely. "The secret is to read the signs and, when they have street cleaning, be poised and ready to move in on the space once they've cleaned the streets. You've got maybe 15 or 20 minutes before the street starts to fill back up. Anywhere in the city you can do that. I mean, theoretically, I could leave it across from the Plaza if I wanted to." Mr. Chrystie claimed he can parallel park the AirStream, too.

Mr. Chrystie, who is brown-haired, clean-cut and still baby-faced at 36 years, is a kind of modern cowboy. He sells wild buffalo meat to restaurants in Manhattan, and he regularly travels to Montana to pick out animals for slaughter. While he's there, he lives in the AirStream.

But Mr. Chrystie won't rough it, R.V. style, in Manhattan. "The problem is that you got street noise, and you also got people all night knocking on it because they want to touch it." Not that he hasn't considered it. "I've thought about it. As a bachelor in the city, the chance to live in a party bus…."

Lately, however, Mr. Chrystie's party bus has been causing a fair amount of trouble. His AirStream, it seems, has become Chelsea's trailer non grata. Someone planted an angry fistprint on the RV's back panel. Irate neighbors have complained to the police so many times that the 10th Precinct doesn't return calls about him any more, he boasted. ( The Observer checked, and indeed, it's perfectly legal to take up three parking spaces with a single vehicle.)

"People have knocked on my window and yelled at me," Mr. Chrystie said. "Like, 'What the hell do you think you're doing parking in the street?'"

Mr. Chrystie scoffed at that criticism. "I'm like, 'I have an apartment here, too.' It's basically people being jealous that I have that rig. The fact that people think they own this street–it's absurd.

"I mean, it's a dog-eat-dog world, especially in New York. You know, the fact that I could get the spot, kudos to me. "

–Ian Blecher

Plimpton's Conviction

On a recent afternoon in Brooklyn, the author and Paris Review editor George Plimpton stood in the lobby of Brooklyn Family Court, right beside the metal detectors. Earlier that morning, a woman with a large gold chain around her waist had set off the detectors repeatedly; told to remove the chain, she began removing all her clothes, stripping almost to the waist before she was removed by a court officer. Now the elegant Mr. Plimpton was standing in roughly the same spot. He and nearly 20 others were in Brooklyn for "Day in Family Court," a principal-for-a-day type of affair sponsored by the group Legal Information for Families Today, in which outsiders are shown how the chaotic court works–or, in some cases, doesn't work.

Perching himself behind the family court judge, Mr. Plimpton sat in the courtroom and observed one of that day's sessions. He watched as a couple argued over visitation. He listened as a woman told the judge how her ex-husband smacked her, choked her and shoved her into a metal gate outside her doctor's office, causing her to miscarry.

When the session was over, Mr. Plimpton stood up painfully and walked slowly out into a waiting room packed with shouting, sulking, angry, miserable people and then stood there, swaying slightly, looking sternly left and right like an old raptor.

Afterward, Mr. Plimpton and his fellow participants packed into a van to head back to Manhattan. Most of the passengers sat silently, a little stunned. Turning sidewise, Mr. Plimpton regarded a reporter for a moment and offered: "Well, there's certainly no love lost between these people, is there?"

Mr. Plimpton nodded at Liberty Aldrich, the domestic-violence lawyer (and daughter of Paris Review contributing editor Nelson Aldrich) who had convinced him to come that day. He frowned. "I don't know what she expects me to do about all this," he confided.

–Annia Ciezadlo

"He answered the decathlon," Mr. Plimpton said. "He said it was because, there, you had 10 disciplines that you could concentrate on … And it's quite evident that he has the ability to do it, too. This is a man who is able to stand and give a speech and not have you-know-who popping up in the back of his head."

In a word, Bill Clinton is the national embodiment of a neurotic symptom that has showed up as the self-description of overreachers everywhere: compartmentalization. And, boy, can he compartmentalize. Never before has American public life been witness to a man who can open and shut the many doors of his mind and soul with such chilling self-assurance. The country has watched with wonder and nausea as Bill Clinton has diffracted himself into several Bill Clintons-the adulterer, the good father, the loyal husband, the lousy husband, the liar, the truth-teller, the empath, the charmer, the politico, the policy wonk, the man who loved Yitzhak Rabin, the man who strokes Yasir Arafat, the peacemaker, the missile launcher, the liberal, the social conservative, the moral arbiter, the seducer. Is he polymorphous? Is he perverse? He is the man about whom Toni Morrison wrote, "He's our first black President." And yet he's not a black man. He's just trained, as his generation was, to be all things to all men, and women. And not too much of anything to anyone.

He's compartmentalized.

And at last count, 62 percent of the country loved the guy.

And 62 percent of the compartmentalized nation said they couldn't trust him.

Because just as Bill Clinton long ago chose to abandon rigid character for cagey adaptability, we, too, suspect that it may be the only way to survive in the new Mad Max century. Compartmentalization is the neurosis of our time, the psychological refuge of the privileged and the spoiled. It's the malady of a society with endless choices. Got a problem? Create a new window for it!

Since Monica Lewinsky spurted onto the scene one year ago, the Republicans have been trying to sell us on character, and it hasn't worked. George Bush had character. So did Bob ("I'm just a man") Dole. But character is an inhibiting constraint in this era; it keeps you from doing everything you want. Like our President, we don't want to deny ourselves anything, we don't want to be pinned down, we don't want to do the hard work of integration. We all want to wriggle free. We want to present many versions of ourselves to everybody. And we don't want to disappoint anybody. What did Dick Morris tell the President? The American people would accept adultery, but not perjury. What is adultery? It's showing affection to too many people. What's perjury? It's getting caught lying.

When Linda Tripp told the TV cameras, "I am you," she was laughed off stage. Because deep down we already knew: Bill Clinton was us. We've all got a you-know-who or a you-know-what popping up in the backs of our heads. And we continue to marvel at a man who has been able to pull it off. Until recently.

"When the scandal first broke last January, and he had to deliver his State of the Union address, Clinton hit a grand slam using his ability to compartmentalize," said Clinton biographer David Maraniss. "All the senators and Congressmen in the hall were staring at him, wondering, 'Could I have done this? Could I have concentrated on this speech while everything was breaking apart around me?'"

Mr. Clinton may be the prime specimen of the compartmentalizer, but take a look around New York. In a city which thrives on that sense of everything continually breaking apart around one, we are surrounded by a city of compartmentalizers. It's just that no one really wants to admit it.

Compartmentalizers eventually have to make a decision: a healthy dose of self-disgust may drive them to change their lives, or they must tip the scales of their own destruction, à la Bill Clinton. If only to silence the unbearable noise of all those opening and shutting doors.

"On the one hand, you probably can't succeed in modern life without being able to compartmentalize," said Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac . "This culture favors people who are able to not grieve for long periods of time, to be very flexible, to put things aside and move on. On the other hand, there is some loss involved, in the way that we think it's a fully human trait to be deeply affected by things; that if you've done something wrong that there's some virtue in really sitting with it, contemplating it, being some way moved to deep changes, and feeling oneself as a whole person. That's a psychological ideal that could be counterpoised to this other ideal, of being able to say 'Well, that was bad, and now, what's on my agenda for today?'"

"Compartmentalization is what allows us to focus," said Sharyn Wolf, a West Village psychotherapist and author of the book Fifty Ways to Find a Lover . "Manhattanites have massive stimuli from all kinds of places funneling through our heads at all times … A woman who when she's at home, she's a mom, when she's in the office, she's a lawyer, when she's at a party, she's a good, funky dancer-compartmentalizing is part of what helps us just sort of be in the moment. Basically, if you have no compartmentalization whatsoever, you're probably schizophrenic."

Dr. Bertram Slaff, a psychiatrist affiliated with Mount Sinai Hospital who has a private practice on the Upper East Side, holds a similarly benign view. "I don't think that it should be thought of in terms of an illness," he said. "It seems to me a coping technique that many people have, which is to have something for being a parent, and something for being a social individual, and something for being a worker. I think of it not as something wrong but just as something that is. It requires that we be able to prioritize, what we would call focusing."

However, Dr. Jerome Levin, New York psychotherapist and author of the just-published The Clinton Syndrome: The President and the Destructive Nature of Sexual Addiction , thinks he knows the First Compartmentalizer all too well. "I compare Clinton to the Titanic ," he said, "which had these watertight compartments, but they only went up to the sixth deck. Once the water went over that level, the ship sank."

The ship was sunk, of course, by a blowjob, the sex act of choice for the modern compartmentalizer. "You separate your genitals from the rest of you," said Dr. Levin. There's no real relationship there, except that she brings him to orgasm."

"Monica Lewinsky truly wanted it," said Mr. Plimpton. "She kept pleading with him, 'Put it in me.' The reason he didn't do it: discipline. He kept himself from going all the way. Clinton must have been telling himself that although they were having fun, I must be careful. I mustn't go all the way."

The President learned early. "This form of compartmentalizing is nothing new for Clinton," declared Mr. Maraniss. "It goes back to his childhood … His mother taught him how to create different fantasy worlds to help keep him going. As the wife of an alcoholic, it was the same thing that she had to do."

Then again, sometimes compartmentalization makes swell bedfellows. Politically divided power couple Mary Matalin and James Carville prospered personally and professionally through rigorous compartmentalization. During the 1992 Presidential campaign, Ms. Matalin told the Los Angeles Times , "I had to compartmentalize my sweet baby James and Carville the Ax-Murdering Consultant From Hell, whose face I wanted to rip off every day."

Since the Lewinsky scandal broke, said Ms. Matalin, their temporarily integrated household has recompartmentalized. "My New Year's resolution is to no longer take out my husband for the foibles of his President," she said four days into 1999. "It's been much worse than quitting smoking." Ms. Matalin said their differences over the Monica matter is on a par with their debates about partial-birth abortion. "We obviously have to compartmentalize now more than we ever did. Last year was the supreme test of my capacity to do so within the house."

New Yorkers who admit to compartmentalizing tend to cast it as a positive thing, a time management skill. "I certainly feel, well, that relates to me," said Kate White, author of Nine Secrets of Women Who Get Everything They Want and freshly appointed editor in chief of Cosmopolitan. "I remember my very first editor-in-chief job, at Child magazine, and what it was like when everything's really resting on you and you in a sense own it. For the first time, I didn't just slam the door on the work and forget about it. It went with me. I was giving my 9-month-old son a bath and I realized I was thinking about the magazine." Then she compartmentalized and presto! All was well.

"I think that if you want to get to the top in many ways, in any industry, that you have to be able to claw on your way up, and a lot of that has to be compartmentalized," said Women on Top author Nancy Friday, who is married to Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine. "It's so tied into a career, having business goals. The workplace is the workplace and you don't want to bring your feelings into it." Is her husband, well, you know …? "Let me put it simply," she said. "He was compartmentalized when I met him, but I always thought that was the first work that you do in getting a man to fall in love with you, is talking him into dropping those barriers." (Mr. Pearlstine did not return a phone call seeking comment.)

"The demands on character are much higher here [in New York]," said Ms. Wolf, the therapist. "The ability to be fragmented in a thousand places is much more prominent. The simple business of noise around us! The simple business of how much we need to earn to pay our rent. The simple business of the kind of shape people expect us to be in somehow."

Naomi Wolf, the Rhodes Scholar, mother, wife, post-feminist babe, anti-makeup author, pro-makeup author, recently reinstated New Yorker, had this to say about the "C" malady: "Anyone in this kind of alpha, hyper, success-driven culture is encouraged and rewarded to split off any aspect of themself that is vulnerable, complex, or weak … I think it's one of the great sort of diseases of late industrialized society, that we're not integrated. It's dangerous, because the more compartmentalized, the more amoral you can tell yourself to be."

Are Rhodes Scholars, like the President, particularly susceptible? "If what you're talking about is dishonesty to the self, then definitely the need to present a perfect front, a perfect facade generates-I mean, it's a recipe for dishonesty, to others and to the self," she said. "I wouldn't think Rhodes scholars any more than anyone else in our own particular cultural rat race, which is about competitiveness and naked ambition at the expense of integration of real values."

What does she think of her fellow Rhodes scholar in the White House? "I can't talk about that!" she said, slamming shut that compartment. "I have so many partisan conflicts , my husband's ties to the White House and so on. But I can talk about compartmentalization as a thing ." For example, she said, "I can't bear to bring my daughter's photographs with me when I'm traveling on business, because I wouldn't be able to leave her if I had something so concrete to remind me of her."

Does success require compartmentalization?

"I suppose it's a very good way to organize oneself. I don't really think about it much," said Manhattanite Todd Solondz, director of the film Happiness , with its psychologist-father-pederast protagonist. Of the characters in his movie, Mr. Solondz said, "I thought they were quite functional … I mean, you know, they all held jobs and took care of, managed their families and so forth, and were materially O.K."

Tom Freston, the chairman of MTV Networks, remembers growing up in a world where compartmentalization was actually easier . "My father seemed to have his life completely compartmentalized," he said. "He would get out of work at 5 P.M., maybe go to a conference a year, and that would be it." Mr. Freston has a more difficult time of it. "With all the things we have to carry now, cell phones and beepers, I've found that it's harder and harder to compartmentalize and stop things from my business life seeping into my personal life," he said. "The premise of 1984 was that it was the government watching you. Now it has expanded: It's your friends, the people you work with."

Take Josh Byard, rising star in New York's Silicon Alley, 27, former P.R. man. "I'm highly compartmentalized," he said. "For example, I have a certain group of friends that I knew when I was in college that I do certain things with, and then I have people that I work with who I also get along with, and I also have other friends that I've met since I've gotten out of college, and it is very rare that I bring people together in that way."

Others hear the word compartmentalization and snort. "The idea of compartmentalization has the same qualities as Ivory soap," said Dr. Robert Cancro, chair of the New York University psychiatry department. "It's 99.44 percent froth. Why do we have to explain how people deal with adversity while continuing with their day to day responsibilities? What you have to remember is that organisms much simpler than humans are able to adapt. There is a tendency to believe that whenever anything is granted a name, it exists. To grant this a name beyond adaptation and coping is just plain silly."

Dr. Slaff tended to agree. "Surely you are aware," he said, "that there are many men who have wives who are put on a pedestal whom they respect, and they have fucking good fun with whores. Isn't that compartmentalization? It's generally thought of as part of the real world."

Of the President, Dr. Slaff said, "I think he was horny! He's 52 years old, and do individuals that age have the right to be horny? Of course they do!"

"In the past, when we heard someone saying one thing, then doing another, we assumed it was just outright hypocrisy," said Dr. Gail Reed, an Upper East Side psychiatrist . "And by just looking at the external behavior, it is … But what do we consider it if the person is really not aware of what they are doing? There are various degrees by which people are dishonest about things which make them ashamed, from the most psychotic form of lying (when the person is completely aware of the lie) to various ways of trying to protect themselves from pain and embarrassment because they've done something they know they shouldn't have done."

"Clinton is not the first person of whom this has been said," said speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who was a genius at taking the various compartments of Ronald Reagan and George Bush and wrapping them into one compact point of light. "It was said 30 years ago, admiringly , of John F. Kennedy," said Ms. Noonan. "In that case, what they meant in those days when they said that a man had a gift for compartmentalization, they meant in a way that he was a gifted generalist that could go from one demanding subject to another, and who could balance in his mind. It was considered an intellectual gift; now it is viewed as a emotional process."

And her fellow New Yorkers? "It is a hard-shouldered city that we have here," she said. "It is full of geniuses, risk takers, dreamers … and to make things a little more confusing, a lot of the geniuses, risk takers, dreamers, are also operators , too. So, are there a lot of people in New York who will say, my gosh, I compartmentalize, too? Yeah, there are. And I suppose some of them might even mean something good about it."

One New Yorker, George Stephanopoulos-Washingtonian-turned-West Side resident, Rhodes scholar, Stairmasterer, White House aide, ABC News employee, Columbia University faculty member-had the last word on the topic.

"Compartmentalization," he said, "is just too Clinton. I'm sorry."