“Is Tim asking me whether I want to have his baby?” the voiceover intones. “I only took this class so I could stare at him.” Finally, “Ain’t no other man but Wu.”

As a band struck up, the women stood in a girl-group formation, spun around and showed their posteriors to the crowd, branded with lettering that read “I ♥ Wu.”

The video of the performance, which was part of the biannual “Columbia Law Revue,” quickly made its way to the Internet video-sharing Web site YouTube.

In 2006, Mr. Wu co-wrote the book Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World.

According to the book’s editor, Who Controls the Internet?, which came out this past March, has sold between 8,000 and 10,000 copies. The number of people who have watched the video on YouTube within a week of the performance was 251.

Absurdly, the way things are going in publishing, in law and on the Internet, it’s hard to know which number is the better indicator of Mr. Wu’s prospects as a legal superstar.

“There’s a fine line between being someone who has a brand and does comment on public things, and being someone who wantonly diffuses their academic perch to comment on all sorts of random things they know nothing about,” Mr. Wu said innocently. “I was a little afraid of getting into that latter category.”

Mr. Wu is often heard on NPR and read on Slate. He’s at work on an article for The New York Times Magazine and is represented by literary agent Chris Calhoun, whose clients include Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and poet laureate Billy Collins.

For a recent dinner interview, Mr. Wu wore a striped zippered sweater and sneaker-shoes, and carried a boxy red Euro-looking shoulder bag. He could be a computer programmer or a grad student. Half-Taiwanese, he appears to be cultivating a goatee. He drives a 1974 CB Honda motorcycle. He’s a recurring fixture at Burning Man, the neo-hippie arts festival set annually in the Nevada desert, where he sometimes dons a cowboy costume. In the small hours of the day, he has been known to stumble out of the East Village sake bar Decibel.

Mr. Wu’s latest article for Slate was “A Dumpling Manifesto,” and he was eager to demonstrate his expertise to a reporter at Chinatown Brasserie, the kind of restaurant where the dim lighting and dance-music remixes make the food start to seem a little beside the point.

On the soup dumplings: “This is a very important dish and very hard to make.”

On the shrimp-and-chive dumplings: “This is a dumpling that’s become popular over the past 10 years.”

On the shrimp dumplings: “This is a triumph of Cantonese ingenuity, this dumpling.”

“Journalists will listen to you, because of your affiliation, on completely random topics,” Mr. Wu said. “And so there’s sort of a duty of self-control, of not talking about stuff you don’t know anything about. Of course, it’s tempting.”

Mr. Wu’s primary editor at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick, is a big fan of Mr. Wu’s.

“He’s done what a lot of legal academics would dream about doing,” she said.

She said that seven or eight years ago, she had trouble getting law professors to write for her.

“They would be like, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I’m really busy. What could I possibly say in 1,200 words?’”

These days, she said, professors are clamoring to do it.

“There’s no question that what you want to do is be the guy who the media says, ‘I need a piece on YouTube. Who’s the guy—what’s his name? Tim.’ That’s true for Rick Hasen with election law. Dershowitz is absolutely it for criminal defense.”

Law schools have always had professors who love the limelight, but Mr. Wu is beginning especially early in his career.

“I don’t think we have a model of somebody’s who’s really done it successfully yet,” said Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, who writes a column for Wired magazine and is a mentor of Mr. Wu’s.

“It’s a very dangerous strategy for an academic, and its dangerous because it’s a very jealous and small-minded business, the business of being an academic,” Mr. Lessig said.

The dean of Columbia Law School, David Schizer, called Mr. Wu “a superstar.”

But becoming a superstar outside the rarefied world of “top academics” is a longer labor—and increasingly important for law professors who want to make themselves a commodity in an intensely competitive market. Whether the academy is ready for a generation of Mr. Wus remains to be seen.

“I obviously have a view that it’s very important to popularize some issues,” said Mr. Lessig of his own work, “because there are really critically important issues at stake right now, and it really takes trying to convey something that the academy understands clearly to the policymakers so that the policymaker can do the right thing. So what Tim’s doing is very important from a policy perspective—but he’s not a chaired, tenured professor that can really afford it in the way that maybe I can afford it.”

“If you want to get intellectual about it, it’s all about audience,” said Mr. Wu (who’s got the tenure, but not the chair). “So traditionally, law professors wrote for other professors and sometimes wrote for judges and for lawyers. In some fields, that’s not the relevant audience. If you’re writing in copyright, creative industries are a relevant audience, and so you’ve got to reach them however you can. And if you write about technology, the industry is the relevant audience—the industry, and the pundits in the industry, those guys. There’s no way they’re ever going to read a law-review article, so you need to come to them.”

In the academy, he is known for being one of the first advocates of “network neutrality,” which is the notion that broadband providers shouldn’t discriminate against any Internet destinations. He’s certainly well represented in the professional journals, with 11 law-review articles under his belt. (Of course, there’s another relevant statistic to make that even more impressive: In the past year, he was ranked the 13th-most-downloaded law professor.)

But Mr. Wu is increasingly prominent outside the academy, too. In its December issue, Scientific American names him as one of this year’s 50 top scientific achievers for articulating this idea.

There have been other awards, as well.

“He won the lemon-meringue-pie-eating contest,” his former boss, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, told The Observer. “He taught me how to order special delicatessen sandwiches by Internet, and he was indefatigable—a valuable man in chambers.”

“I used to call him the Genius Wu,” said Judge Richard Posner. “That was my nickname for him. He’s very, very, very smart.”

When Mr. Wu arrived in New York in January, he sat a friend down and explained his belief that law professors only get what he called “one extracurricular.”

“I wasn’t really sure which one I would get to. I started looking at the careers of successful academics,” he said.

There were the practitioners: Harvard’s Laurence Tribe and Stanford’s Kathleen Sullivan. The writers: New Republic legal-affairs editor and George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen, and New York Times Magazine contributing writer and N.Y.U. law professor Noah Feldman. The policy advisor: Berkeley Law School dean Christopher Edley Jr., a veteran of the Carter and Clinton administrations.

He picked writing, for magazines, newspapers and the Internet, for now.

There’s his self-publishing. On his Web site, TimWu.org, Mr. Wu posts snapshots from his trips to places like Sierra Leone and Nepal, and hosts a blog-like section entitled “What’s New with Wu.” The barebones site can be viewed in Chinese, which he speaks “badly,” along with Japanese, French and German.

On Slate, he’s written articles about the dangers of Supreme Court justices making political hires; the ability of U.S. marijuana policy to withstand W.T.O. law; the “Kung Pao Chickenization” of China’s film industry; the Bush administration’s subpoena of Google’s records; and the legal protections available to YouTube.

The son of two scientists, Mr. Wu studied biochemistry at McGill in Montreal, Canada. But he was clumsy in the lab. His friend had some law-school applications lying around, and Mr. Wu sent them in, literally penciling in the one to Harvard.

Though he had good grades in law school, he didn’t make the Harvard Law Review, a fact he attributes to his lack of obsessive-compulsiveness. Still, Mr. Wu had stood out in a class about the law of cyberspace, attracting attention from Professor Lessig.

“He was never quite convinced that you should be teaching him as opposed to him teaching you,” Mr. Lessig said approvingly.

Mr. Wu—a self-described “radical moderate, an angry moderate”—scored that prestigious clerkship with the libertarian Judge Posner on a recommendation from Mr. Lessig. It’s an experience that he likened to training with a “kung fu master.”

When Mr. Wu’s application for a Supreme Court clerkship was being reviewed, Mr. Lessig recalled being asked by Justice Breyer, “Both you and Dick Posner seem to think he’s really outstanding, but he’s not on the Harvard Law Review.”

He got the job anyway. As hard as it is to imagine, this sentiment from the justice seems to encapsulate the feelings of other academics about Mr. Wu, some of whom can’t help but envy the way things seem to have fallen into place so easily for him.

“There’s sort of a traditional path in law school,” he said. “… You can imagine a house that everyone’s trying to get into, which is something like a Supreme Court clerkship. I always thought there was a massive line headed at the front door, but if you just took a little side route …. It seemed to me everyone was trying to beat down the same door. You could do a little bit of different thinking, and jump in through an open window.”

When his clerkship ended, Mr. Wu didn’t return directly to academia; nor, as many others do post-clerkship, did he put in the de rigueur two or three years at a firm or on a research fellowship. Instead, he went to Silicon Valley to work in marketing for Riverstone Networks, a telecommunications company.

He had published only two articles when he grew tired of the 9-to-5 grind and put himself on the market; he was hired by the University of Virginia. They “took pity on me,” he said.

Three years later, some of the country’s other top schools were calling. Mr. Wu visited at Columbia, the University of Chicago and Stanford, but Mr. Schizer was the first out of the gate with a tenure offer.

Eight months, one cross-country drive and a Lasik surgery appointment later, Mr. Wu had arrived in New York, and with a job for life.

In a phone conversation, the law-student skit came up, and he talked about it and the “I ♥ Wu” shorts, sheepishly.

“I have to get a pair of those,” he said.

Stop Her Now, the most professional of the anti-Hillary operations, is now in debt. And the campaign of Jonathan Tasini, the liberal Clinton Senate challenger, had a remarkably poor first two months of fundraising, considering the wide attention he got on places like DailyKos and other energy centers of the Left.

He raised $24,236 from just 22 donors, according to his report to the Federal Elections Commission. (That's about $500 more than Stop Her Now raised, actually.) Barbara Ehrenreich maxed out. Lawrence Lessig chipped in. There was certainly no out-pouring of small-dollar Web support.

Tasini told me when he launched his campaign, "If there's a base of [financial and volunteer] support within about 30 to 60 days, I think this campaign has legs and is going to get off the ground.... This may not touch an nerve and then we're not going to be able to do it. We'll see."

Does 22 donors count as touching a nerve?

In a profession dominated by nerds, intellectual property (I.P.) lawyers have long served the useful role of letting other lawyers feel that at least they're not the nerdiest. It's perhaps not surprising, then, that in recent years we've seen a number of prominent I.P. scholars aggressively reinvent themselves as more accessible public intellectuals. The most notable example of this is Stephen Carter, who went from soft-spoken I.P. professor to Presidential adviser (on bioethics), then on to highly paid best-selling novelist.

The Internet boom has provided a more obvious and systematic path for scholars to pull themselves out of the I.P. ghetto and contribute to a debate of interest and relevance to a broad audience: one day cocooned in the dry arcana of copyright, trademark and patent law, the next spreading your wings as a new breed of legal superhero, the cyber-lawyer. Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and chair of something called the Creative Commons project, is probably the most prolific and influential of the I.P. scholars newly blessed with Internet street cred. Free Culture, Mr. Lessig's latest book, is a provocative and engaging polemic against The Man for trying to keep down his peeps hanging on the Net.

Free Culture comes in two distinct parts. I will focus here on the longer first part, which is a highly entertaining but utterly unconvincing argument for a fundamental rethinking of how we regulate creative content in the Internet era. The second part, which seems like an afterthought, is a poignant chronicle of Mr. Lessig's unsuccessful effort to have the latest legislative extension of copyright protections declared unconstitutional.

Mr. Lessig weaves together a tapestry of charming anecdote, history, and economic and legal theory to lead us to his conclusion that copyright regulation must be scaled back dramatically. His core argument is that the combined impact of three factors-"changing law, concentrated markets, and changing technology"-cries out for what he euphemistically refers to as certain "adjustments" to the law that would, in his view, "restore the balance that has traditionally defined" the relationship between the legal protections of creative property and the ability of anyone to engage in unfettered creativity.

Mr. Lessig is on firmest ground with respect to the "changing law" element of his thesis. During the first 150 years of our history, the maximum copyright term was extended only twice (from 28 years to 42 to 56); since 1962, however, Congress has extended the terms of existing copyrights 11 times to the current 95 years-which does seem like an awfully long time. Particularly compelling is Mr. Lessig's argument that any retroactive extension of copyrights-as many of the recent extensions have been-serves no useful social purpose.

Mr. Lessig is on shakiest ground when he tries to demonstrate that element of his argument which he concedes is most critical to his overall thesis: "In my view, all of these [other] changes would not matter much if it weren't for … [t]he change in the concentration and integration of media [over] the past twenty years." Here, instead of any kind of systematic argument, Mr. Lessig offers random anecdotes and statistics, some of which actually undercut his position: "There are twenty major newspaper publishers in the United States. The top ten film studios receive 99 percent of all film revenue. The ten largest cable companies account for 85 percent of all cable revenues. This is a market far from the free press the framers sought to protect." That adds up to 40 major media voices (actually 38, since one studio is also a newspaper publisher and another studio is also a cable company), and that doesn't include radio (satellite and terrestrial) and television broadcasters, cable programmers, multichannel satellite services or Internet content providers. Ironically, Mr. Lessig repeatedly cites Intel, a company with a greater than 80 percent market share in its industry, as the paradigm of a forward-looking company sympathetic to "free culture."

Of course there's been consolidation. But fragmentation of media has occurred significantly faster, resulting in less market power, not more. The same is true with respect to copyright law and changes in technology: New technologies mean I.P. regulation covers things it did not before, but the realm of the free and unregulated-as Mr. Lessig himself documents well when he describes the explosion of "blogs"-has grown much more quickly.

Mr. Lessig ends his argument with this "astonishing conclusion": "Never in our history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the development of our culture than now. Never." If you think this statement accurately describes the world in which we now live, I'm not likely to change your mind. But if, like me, you think that we're living in a world where the barriers to "cultural" entry have never been lower, then you'll be curious to see how Mr. Lessig managed to end up somewhere so far from reality.

You'll have to read closely: His accessible style gives his polemic an air of reasonableness even when it is at its thinnest.

Extremists on the other side make Mr. Lessig seem downright sensible. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, claims that intellectual property should be treated like any other property under the law, whereas, in fact, the Constitution has a specific provision that allows Congress to secure intellectual property rights of "Author and Inventors" only for "limited Times." But Mr. Lessig's own arguments are similarly flawed: He suggests that the Constitution's free-speech provisions should somehow be read to require that the "limited Times" be very limited indeed. Again and again, Mr. Lessig subtly overstates his historic, practical or legal case-and, in the end, his credibility is undermined. To claim that Mr. Valenti's admittedly extreme position has "no reasonable connection to our actual legal tradition," for instance, ignores that the British common-law rule (which is arguably close to Mr. Valenti's position) was the law in this country until the first federal copyright statute was enacted in 1790.

At times, it seems that Mr. Lessig is using the advent of the Internet as a pretext to pursue a radical copyright-policy agenda. Many of the points he makes about the impact of new technology could have been made with the advent of the Xerox machine. Creativity survived the Xerox machine and will survive the Internet without the need for a fundamentally different legal regime. Indeed, the essential impact of the Internet is that it has dramatically lowered the barriers to both accessing and sharing all forms of creative output. That's why many of the examples Mr. Lessig cites to justify his proposals-restrictions on e-books or barriers to the creation of a digital archive-seem trivial in comparison with the explosion of new creative output that we experience all around us.

To be fair, some of Lawrence Lessig's policy proposals seem sensible, and might even be helpful at the margins. But the idea that they could have a meaningful impact on the ability of "Big Media" to "lock down culture and control creativity" is something only a nerdy I.P. lawyer would believe.

Jonathan A. Knee is a senior managing director at Evercore Partners and an adjunct professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School.

A Sad, True Novel About Haiti

The Dew Breaker , by Edwidge Danticat. Alfred A. Knopf, 244 pages, $22.

Only a few hours away by luxury jet lies an island paradise of palm trees and warm sand where the air itself feels forgiving. Lovely chocolate-skinned women wear pink nightgowns, jacarandas grow wild and the customary old-fashioned way to say "You're welcome" is to say "You're deserving." It's a charmed place where "the rain is sweeter, the dust is lighter," and the clouds in the sky are said to be caused by dear, departed relatives eating coconuts with God. Eating Coconuts with God , in fact, wouldn't be a bad title for a lighthearted book about such a quaintly blessed place. Except there's a hitch: Bloodshed is rampant.

And so the title of Edwidge Danticat's new novel about Haiti is not Eating Coconuts with God , but rather The Dew Breaker ; it's named for the central character, a professional government torturer whose M.O. was to "break into your house … before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves." He'd break the dew, then systematically break your bones.

Recent news photos from this island are notable mostly for the numbing sense of déjà vu they engender in the viewer. Chrome guns gleam in black hands, frenzied crowds jubilate in the streets by stomping the heads of political opponents, an air of grim festivity pervades, like a World Series victory celebration gone mad. Haiti is again aswirl with wide-smiling violence; the air that should reek of bougainvillea is once more perfumed with gunpowder.

In prose as supple and deadpan as the tropical landscape she describes, Ms. Danticat colors in the blanks behind the headlines. A pot-bellied police officer smells "like fried eggs and gasoline, like breakfast at the Amoco." Traumatized victims gibber in their sleep, wetting their beds "not with urine but with words." Innocent bystanders tend "to be silent a moment too long during an important conversation and then say too much." Others simply go bananas, like the father who manifests his insanity by "walking naked to the marketplace twice a week, clutching a rock in each fist." Yet life, perforce, goes on. Here's ordinary daily sexual yearning, as felt by a husband for a wife who has finally come from Haiti to join him in his rented American basement room after a separation of years: "She smelled good, a mixture of lavender and lime. He simply wanted to get her home, if home it was … and to reduce the space between them until there was no air for her to breathe that he was not breathing too."

Ms. Danticat has set herself a sacred mission: to give weight and dignity to those whose grainy faces we glimpse between sips of our morning coffee, "men and women whose tremendous agonies filled every blank space in their lives." She writes about them in a voice that's so surprisingly flat as to be almost inert, as though run through a wringer.

Each chapter features a different character, nearer to or farther from the heart of darkness-violence engulfs even those distant from the epicenter. The reader needs to be something of a locksmith to fit the pieces together. "It's like a puzzle, a weird-ass kind of puzzle, man," one of the characters remarks, and you won't master all the connections until the closing pages, when it clicks into place with the aha of satisfaction. But the satisfaction is a hurtful one, radiating as it does from the central character, the eponymous dew breaker, who claims the final chapter for himself.

"One of hundreds who had done their jobs so well that their victims were never able to speak of them again," this torturer is not a nice fellow. "He liked questioning the prisoners, teaching them to play zo and bezik, stapling clothespins to their ears as they lost and removing them as he let them win, convincing them that their false victories would save their lives. He liked to paddle them with braided cowhide, stand on their cracking backs and jump up and down like a drunk on a trampoline, pound a rock on the protruding bone behind their earlobes until they couldn't hear the orders he was shouting at them, tie blocks of concrete to the end of sisal ropes and balance them off their testicles if they were men or their breasts if they were women." Perhaps the ultimate unforgivable injustice he commits is this: "He'd wound you, then try to soothe you with words, then he'd wound you again. He thought he was God."

Yet it's the singular achievement of this novel to make us feel bad for the bad guy. Who can be privy to his rationalizations and guilt, his familial love and childhood dreams, without acknowledging that even he-especially he-has within him the seeds of redemption? "You and me, we save him," his wife tells his daughter, when she learns the truth. "When I meet him, it made him stop hurt the people. This how I see it. He a seed thrown in rock. You, me, we make him take root."

The wistful contends with the brutish. The ghastliest atrocities-facial scalping "where skin was removed from dead victims' faces to render them unidentifiable," whipping the soles of the feet till they bleed, making casual foes drink a gallon of gas and then lighting a match-are counterbalanced by paeans to human beauty: eyes that are "chartreuse" or "velvet-brown," skin that is "the color of sorrel" or "silken and very black, her few wrinkles … more like beauty marks than signs of old age." Or this: "Beatrice threw her head back and let out an earsplitting laugh, contorting her face in such a way that her skin, had it been cloth, would have taken hours to iron out."

These details are delivered languidly, leaf by leaf, as it were, like the leaves falling from the green ash trees, "shaking ever so slightly in the afternoon breeze … seemingly suspended in the air, then falling ever so slowly as if cushioned by air bubbles." As they accumulate-the details of beauty no less inexorably than the details of torture-they acquire the specific gravity of truth.

Here we learn exactly what it feels like to inhabit a body that is no longer your own: "The preacher was thrown in the back of a truck. A group of Miliciens piled on top of him. He raised his feet close to his chest as they shoved him from side to side, pounding rifle butts on random parts of his body. His face was now pressed against the metal undulations of the truck bed, boot soles and heels raining down on him, cigarette butts being put out in his hair, which sizzled and popped like tiny grains of rock salt in an open fire …. Someone dragged him by the legs, pulled him forward, removing his jacket, and then he felt himself falling from the back of the truck onto the concrete. He fell on his face, crushing his forehead. His blood quickly soaked the blindfold, a warm veil of red covering the darkness over his eyes. He was being dragged by the legs over the rise of a curb. With each yank forward, a little bit of him was bruised, peeled away. He felt as though he was shedding skin, shedding voice, shedding sight, shedding everything he'd tried so hard to make himself into, a well-dressed man, a well-spoken man, a well-read man. He was leaving all that behind now with bits of his flesh in the ground, morsel by morsel being scraped off by pebbles, rocks, tiny bottle shards and cracks in the concrete."

In one of those odd quirks of human convergence, Jackie Onassis, diminutively disembarking a queen-sized yacht one day back in the 1970's, apparently made a vivid impression on the natives of Haiti. They liked her style. They liked her pink Bermuda shorts and her wide-rimmed sunglasses. Most of all, they liked her grace: "She lost her husband and two babies, yet she remained so beautiful. She made sadness beautiful."

With her grace and her imperishable humanity, her devotion to lives lived like "a pendulum between forgiveness and regret," Edwidge Danticat is every bit Jackie's equal. About her, too, it can be said: She makes sadness beautiful.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer .