Evan Cornog and Victor Navasky. (Photo credit: Brendan Fitzgerald)

If you came to New York expecting book parties to be tame, dignified affairs held in dusty university clubs, where distinguished older gentlemen talk about editors of yore over cocktails and lamb chops, well, your expectations would have been met Monday night at the Columbia University Press launch of The Art of Making Magazines.

The anthology was culled from 10-plus years of lectures by notable magazine editors by Victor Navasky, editor emeritus of The Nation and the director of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism magazine program, and Evan Cornog, the dean of Hofstra University’s School of Communications.

Mr. Cornog spoke with enthusiasm to a small cluster about magazines’ digital future. “Yes, but is the advertising money there?” asked one pragmatic author. Mr. Cornog agreed that getting people to pay for content may pose a challenge.

To be sure, it is an odd time to celebrate the magazine business. Newsweek’s print demise was on many a mind, and tongue. But if there is still a stodgy glamor to be found, it was on display at the Columbia University Club. And, according to departing Columbia J-School dean Nicholas Lemann, rumors of the magazine industry’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, at least if you ask young journalists.

“It always surprises people to hear that our most popular concentration for years has been magazines,” Mr. Lemann told the crowd, before asking if anyone had seen The Devil Wears Prada.

The reference got a hearty laugh.

He went on to explain, however, that while his 20-something sons and their friends were inspired by Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko, apparently The Devil Wears Prada is Wall Street for aspiring female journalists. “[I]n our heavily female school, many of our students watch The Devil Wears Prada and say ‘I want in.’ And so they come to us, and sit at Victor’s feet and learn about magazines,” Mr. Lemann said. “And who knows, maybe one of them will be either the editor of The Nation or the editor of Vogue.”

Mr. Navasky expressed similar surprise that long-form print is still the dream of so many young journalists.

Dreams die hard, it seems.

"I entered the workforce three days after graduating from college and I've been working ever since," he said.

Though Mr. Lemann only made the official announcement about his departure this morning, the news leaked out last night in a  Bloomberg News report. Apparently, word of the dean's potential departure began to make its way around the j-school prior to the Bloomberg story.

"Rumors began to circulate yesterday. But even with a building full of journalists, nobody could confirm it," said Columbia Professor Michael Shapiro.

Mr. Shapiro confirmed the news when he read the Bloomberg story, but he doesn't know who the news outlets' source was.

"They obviously didn't get it from me," he said.

Though news of his exit generated substantial interest from news outlets and his colleagues, Mr. Lemann pointed out that the news isn't exactly shocking since media businesses and universities operate very differently.

"It's a bit of what we call a dog bites man story in journalism," said Mr. Lemann, who went on to explain that, although someone might stay in a powerful role indefinitely in a news organization, the same is not true in the academic world. "An institution is not set up to function when one person stays in leadership positions for years and years."

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger will lead the search for a new dean--another way that academia differs from the professional news business, where Mr. Lemann noted, a departing editor is usually expected to help chose and groom a successor.

On Jan. 31, Janet Robinson, chief executive of the New York Times Company, opened an earnings conference call by addressing the bad news first: a $648 million loss in the fourth quarter of 2006.

The Times Company wrote down the value of its New England Media Group—which includes The Boston Globe—by $814 million, resulting in the substantial quarterly drop.

“Despite this charge,” Ms. Robinson said on the conference call with analysts, “we continue to view these properties as important assets of our company, and we remain acutely focused on improving their performance and value.”

That takes care of jittery investors. But what about The Globe’s rank and file, which has endured speculation that its parent company is slimming the place down in preparation for a sale—possibly to a moneyed suitor like Jack Welch, who has, according to reports, expressed interest in buying?

That’s the agenda for a couple of “town meetings” that Ms. Robinson has scheduled with Globe employees on Feb. 8 and 9.

The Times fended off speculation about Mr. Welch buying the paper at the end of 2006, when Ms. Robinson addressed a conference of Boston leaders. But since then there’s been that giant write-down, which had been preceded by other ominous signs.

On Jan. 11, the Times Company announced 125 jobs would be cut at The Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, first through voluntary buyout packages. Two weeks later, The Globe announced that three foreign bureaus—Jerusalem, Berlin and Bogotá—would be shuttered.

And this past week, 10-plus-year staffers were notified about the buyout packages, with 90 days to decide whether to stay or go.

“There’s no question that these sorts of things can be distracting, but I think people are focused on their work, on their journalism,” said Martin Baron, The Globe’s editor in chief, by phone on Feb. 6. “Ultimately, that’s what matters.”

The upcoming “town meetings” will be run as Q&A sessions, with Globe staffers “welcome to attend and ask Janet about issues or topics of interest relating to our business,” according to a staff memo.

Such obvious distractions—buyouts, layoffs, outsourcing of classified jobs to India, closing of foreign bureaus and rumors of an impending sale—will provide plenty of Q&A fodder.

“I expect we hear her say that there are some reasons for hope, especially in the Boston economy,” said a Globe staffer.

(Indeed, if Ms. Robinson’s speech to analysts is any indication, there will probably be an emphasis on an expected rebound in print advertising in the region.)

But outside Boston, there are lingering concerns.

“Obviously, [the closing of foreign bureaus] limits the kind of jobs that young reporters aspire to,” said a Globe staffer. “Nationally, it arguably diminishes our stature.”

“I think there’s going to be a lot of questions about where The Globe fits into the Times portfolio,” said another staffer.

The New York–Boston relationship was somewhat strengthened last December, according to one Globe staffer, when The Times sent up its research and development staff to give a presentation on technologically advanced ways to spread the news—iPods, cell phones and various electronic devices. Michael Rogers, The Times’ futurist in residence, was among the presenters.

But not everyone is convinced that the Times Company will continue its stewardship of the newspaper it bought for $1.1 billion in 1993.

“The fear, as you probably know, is that The Times will unload The Globe, given its poor recent performance,” said a Globe staffer. “I suppose the first thing we’ll be listening to Janet R. for is assurances that we’ll remain in the Times family. Developments at the Philly Inquirer have soured people on the notion of private ownership by a rich-guys consortium.”

And long-time Globe columnist Alex Beam also isn’t convinced that said rich guys are the answer to quandaries in the newspaper industry.

“Jack Welch and David Geffen’s idea of journalism is like a Charlie Rose interview,” said Mr. Beam. “‘Gosh, Mr. Welch, tell us more about your fabulous career.’ That’s not our idea of journalism.”

Portfolio Launch Nears, Staff Atwitter

“Very few startups have the kind of bankroll behind it that this one does,” said Kurt Eichenwald, a senior writer and investigative reporter at Portfolio.

Mr. Eichenwald was speaking by phone on Feb. 5 from Dallas, Tex., a safe distance from the magazine’s perch on the 17th and 18th floors of the Condé Nast building.

There, Si Newhouse’s much-hyped new business magazine and Web site are getting off the ground, with prototypes circulating and staff writers currently under deadline for the inaugural issue, scheduled to hit newsstands on April 24.

But the glossies on the stands will only be part of the launch. What appears to be emerging is a test case for Condé Nast, which has struggled to make its presence felt on the Web.

Portfolio will follow the path laid down by Glamour, Men’s Vogue and Vanity Fair (which relaunched in October with significant Web-only content). As with those sites, Condé Nast has teamed up with Avenue A Razorfish to develop Portfolio’s Web site.

But once it’s set up, it’s the editorial staff from the magazine that will be keeping things moving.

“Print writers are definitely writing for the Web,” said a source with knowledge of Portfolio’s Web strategy; however, “not every single writer is going to have a blog.”

“Portfolio is a magazine being born in the 21st century,” said Mr. Eichenwald. “Any magazine coming out now cannot look at the Web as just something to put an article on; it has to be viewed as part of the whole.”

That’s certainly true for Mr. Eichenwald.

He spent two decades covering the business world for The New York Times before joining Portfolio this past October.

In December 2005, Mr. Eichenwald wrote an investigative piece on child pornography for The Times that included a video segment. “It really added a lot for people to actually see the person I was writing about,” he said. That video segment was later nominated for an Emmy, and sparked Mr. Eichenwald’s interest in thinking beyond print.

Shortly after arriving at Portfolio, he pitched a video supplement for his first piece. In December, Mr. Eichenwald delivered the demo video, which, he said, is tentatively scheduled to be released for the April launch.

(Already on the Portfolio.com placeholder up now, there is a sample video interview between Portfolio editor in chief Joanne Lipman and Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.)

Last October, Chris Jones, managing editor of the Portfolio Web site, gave a presentation to the Portfolio staff and provided “very early impressions” of the Web site, according to a staffer present. The Web editor attends each staff meeting, providing updates and answering questions. Also, a voluntary editorial meeting specifically for the Web site was initiated this past week.

Another staffer added that the site would look vastly different from the Big Three business titles: Fortune, Forbes and BusinessWeek.

Matt Cooper, Portfolio’s Washington editor and previously Time.com’s political editor, has been rumored among possible bloggers when the site launches.

“We’re all going to do a lot for the Web and print edition,” said Mr. Cooper, declining to confirm the rumor. “It’s a seamless garment.”

And recently, Web editors have made the rounds of the office, according to a staffer, inquiring about which staffers are interested in blogging on swanky side interests—such as art and travel.

But even Portfolio’s seamless garment has had a few tears along the way.

On Jan. 30, the New York Post’s Page Six column reported that the startup was in shambles and that Mr. Newhouse was losing faith.

In that morning’s editorial meeting, to dispel any rumors of chaos, Ms. Lipman said that advertisers were “banging down the door,” according to a staffer present.

Multiple editorial sources have said that the business side of the operation has made reassurances that ads are selling very well, and that the first issue can be expected to run about 250 to 300 pages.

And certainly Si Newhouse, in his usual fashion, will be upstairs counting ad pages and charting the progress of his team—several of whom have a lot riding on Portfolio’s success.

Print, schmint, right?

“We have really ambitious aspirations,” said a Portfolio staffer. However, there is one caveat: “The first magazine that is going to be published is not going to change the face of magazine publishing.”

—M.C.

The New Yorker Will Run Your Correction, Not Its Own

In its Feb. 5 issue, The New Yorker published a message describing factual errors in a Jan. 29 “Talk of the Town” piece by Nicholas Lemann about the trial of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. Mr. Lemann had mistakenly claimed that “Joseph Wilson was dispatched by ‘the White House’ to Niger … (he was sent by the C.I.A.)” and that Mr. Wilson had “published his Times Op-Ed piece ‘five months’ after his return (it was a year and five months).”

The message appeared not in an editors’ correction but in a piece of reader mail, a letter from James Currin of Stamford, Conn. Mr. Currin, 75, is a retired physics professor from SUNY Purchase. He has been reading The New Yorker for more than 50 years. Mr. Lemann is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

“I was surprised that he was so careless,” Mr. Currin said by phone on Feb. 4. “He’s a good writer.”

By legend, the factual infallibility of The New Yorker is both assumed and presumed. Its fabled team of fact-checkers—16 of them at present—vets every detail of the magazine before it reaches the reader. And if the errors that get through are rare, acknowledgements of those errors get through even less often.

The result is the meta-erroneous belief that The New Yorker has a policy against printing corrections at all—a belief that has made it all the way to the Columbia journalism department. “As I understand it, for many, many years they didn’t even run letters to the editor,” Mr. Lemann said. “It’s fairly recent—I can’t remember when they started—that they run letters. They still, since 1925, have not run corrections.”

In fact, although the weekly “Mail” section is a relatively new addition, the magazine has printed letters since at least 1936. And under editor David Remnick, corrections have been appearing as stand-alone items, the industry standard. They are, however, easy to miss, as there have only been about two dozen corrections or editors’ notes since 1999. (A new one appeared in the Feb. 12 issue.)

Through the decades before the current era of regular corrections, the magazine ran occasional ones—a lengthy 1963 editors’ note, for instance, corrected three errors in part four of Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” And it ran dozens and dozens of letters pointing out errors, under the heading “Department of Correction” and variants thereof (“Department of Correction and Amplification,” “Department of Correction, Amplification, and Abuse,” “Department of Correction, Amplification, and General Pettifoggery”).

The handling tended to be arch: In 1940, after being corrected by the editors of Fortune, The New Yorker wrote, “Wrong was the New Yorker, and to the editors of Fortune our check for five dollars for discovering the error.”

The present approach is more measured. Corrections are presented as frank admissions of failure. But in the case of Mr. Currin’s letter, the concession was not quite straightforward.

Mr. Currin, who is the father of celebrated figurative painter John Currin, wrote in to question four assertions that Mr. Lemann had made. Two of his points were matters still under dispute, while the other two—about the provenance of Mr. Wilson’s assignment and the date of his Times Op-Ed piece—were verifiable facts that Mr. Lemann had gotten wrong.

In an e-mail to The Observer, Peter Canby, the head of the fact-checking department, wrote that the errors Mr. Currin pointed out could have been addressed in a formal correction notice. But Mr. Canby wrote that since he and letters editor Brenda Phipps “had a letter in hand that both set the record straight on the erroneous facts and also went on to some other widely debated points of interpretation,” they decided to let Mr. Currin’s letter speak for itself.

Except that Mr. Currin’s note, as written, did not set the record straight. The original draft, according to a copy supplied by Mr. Currin, merely quoted the parts that Mr. Currin thought were wrong. The parenthetical clarifications, explaining what the correct facts had been, showed up after The New Yorker edited the letter.

In other words, the editors wrote a functional correction after all—they just credited it to Mr. Currin.

“Maybe that’s the New Yorker way of correcting an error,” Mr. Currin said. “A graceful way.”

—Leon Neyfakh

You’re the President of the United States, it’s September, and over in Iraq, various gangs of thugs are driving around murdering and terrorizing a certain community, which has, naturally, created some militia outfits to defend itself. Bear in mind that after your martial victory several years before, the new government legislated that all Iraqis, whatever their ethnic background, enjoy equal voting rights, and there’s an election looming in November.

That election is a crucial stage in your planned reconstruction of Iraqi civil society, but owing to the intractable blood feuds, there’s a systematic terrorist campaign to keep the voters away from the polls. Your people out there have urgently requested that you deploy the Army right now to restore order so the election can take place. Now here’s where it gets tricky: In October, there’s an important election in Ohio, and your Republican candidate will lose if the Army gets involved in this increasingly unpopular foreign conflict. So, what do you do?

If, because you believe that this is no time to play dice with people’s lives, you gave the morally obvious answer—order out the troops, crack some skulls and hang the consequences in Ohio—then you’re hereby disqualified from high political office and should stick to reading book reviews at your local Starbucks.

But if your reasoning went something like this: Well, I feel badly for the Iraqis, but these Johnny Foreigners will always find a way to kill each other anyway, and if we lose Ohio my party will collapse, so I’m going to ignore the trouble and hope no one gets too worked up over it, then you should consider a career in Washington, D.C.

Ignore the trouble is precisely what President Ulysses S. Grant chose to do in September 1875 when the beleaguered governor of Mississippi pleaded with him to dispatch federal troops to ensure peaceful state elections. At the time, well-organized hordes of Democratic “White Liners,” mostly recalcitrant Confederates implacably opposed to the extension of the franchise to blacks, were terrorizing the black community to suppress the vote.

The governor, Adelbert Ames, had organized a few companies of black militia to counterbalance the White Liners in an act of brave defiance that raised the horrific (or enticing) possibility of reigniting the Civil War and overthrowing Reconstruction using the specter of an “armed Negro uprising” as a dubious pretext. And what happened? In the election, the Republicans were demolished, and Mississippi returned to white control, soon followed by several other states where the same tactics were employed. Up north, Grant’s man, Rutherford B. Hayes, won re-election as the governor of Ohio. (He succeeded Grant as President and ended Reconstruction, thereby helping to hand the South over to segregationist Democrats.)

Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia’s School of Journalism and a staff writer at The New Yorker, tells the story of what soon became known as “the Mississippi Plan,” its background and its baleful aftermath in Redemption. The undoubted hero of the piece is the remarkable Adelbert Ames, a former Union general from Maine who first traveled to Mississippi under the assumption that he was a savior of the defeated South, only to find himself crucified by an unforgiving enemy. Along the way, this flawed messiah was himself redeemed: From being a political hack hoping to launch a Presidential career and larded down with the usual well-meaning but hopelessly patronizing attitude toward the “simple Negroes,” Ames transformed into a fiery crusader determined to see justice done toward the huddled black masses now set free but still suborned by their appalling former owners.

Mr. Lemann performs a sterling service in excavating these hidden ruins, and Redemption is a superb, supple work of popular narrative history backed up by sound archival evidence. Still, there’s one aspect that troubles me, though maybe I’m just being oversensitive: Mr. Lemann very properly gives both sides of any given clash, yet almost invariably exculpates blacks from any hint of impropriety. By portraying Mississippi’s blacks as universally forbearing and heroic innocents, he inadvertently turns them into caricatures.

Mr. Lemann spends a great deal of time carefully delineating the complex facets and motivations of the whites, but relatively little on their black allies. Were none of them corrupt, did none commit murder, had none ever helped to incite a riot? What about the internal politics of the black community and the inevitable class tensions between newly freed landless and land-owning blacks, or the literate and the illiterate?

In his reluctance to portray blacks as subject to the same vices and temptations as anybody, Mr. Lemann may have feared somehow giving succor to the self-pitying Southern historiography of Reconstruction as a “crime” perpetrated by corrupt blacks and their carpet-bagging pals. By this logic, a hint of anything less than untainted grace and innocence would presumably strengthen the cracker view that these uppity blacks had it coming and that whites were merely protecting themselves.

This is an understandable worry on Mr. Lemann’s part, though I think he should be less fearful. There’s no danger of moral equivalence here: Notwithstanding a few individual acts of violence, Republicans of all races were enforcing the law, a moral law that was the product of a war in which about 600,000 men had recently died. One side was right, the other wrong.

Nevertheless, much to his credit, Mr. Lemann never bashes you over the head with an obvious modern analogy—that was me, I’m afraid—but leaves the reader to read between his lines. Every writer is shaped by the present and thus brings biases to his text, and while the old Southern magnolia-and-moonlight historians who reigned until the 1940’s certainly had theirs, it would be surprising if Mr. Lemann—who’s written several perceptive pieces for The New Yorker about Iraq—had not had the failing reconstruction effort and the all-too-successful terrorist activity there lurking in the back of his mind.

The lesson here is that civil wars are messy affairs that rarely end when the official hostilities do; they linger instead for decades as the aggrieved losers settle old scores. The American Civil War is still, to an extent, being fought. When will the Iraqi one end?

Alexander Rose’s Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring (Bantam) was published in April.

For a writer who revels in gunning down slow-moving targets (hookers, handwriting analysts, Paris Hilton), Mr. Bing has outstanding respect for his book’s subject matter. His introduction walks us through info on the global practitioners of professional BS, then pops the Big Idea: “Guess what? They’re having fun, making a living, and enjoying their lives, perhaps more than you.”

Sure, he lays down some prickly zingers on allergists and agents, but he kids because he loves! After all, these folks “enjoy the best lives imaginable,” getting big respect and big money from little effort.

Mr. Bing’s starry-eyed account of bullshit’s wonders (“This is art! Feel it with your gut!”) is often unfunny and rarely convincing. A serious weakness for exclamation makes it particularly hard to tell when he’s joking (“lace ’em up and do it!”). Would it matter one way or the other? As Princeton’s Harry G. Frankfurt’s shrewd treatise On Bullshit (2005) concludes: “[S]incerity itself is bullshit.”

Whether sincere or ironic or neither or both, the joke can only be on Mr. Bing when he opens his work with an Aristotelian axiom, then analyzes Beowulf, then describes Thomas Wolfe’s novels as “flaccid, egoistical lumps of prose.” Look who’s talking.

Though he mentions Mr. Frankfurt, Mr. Bing declares that defining bullshit “turns out to be difficult.” (Indeed, it would be hard to pinpoint a meaning that stings the hated perpetrators without insulting the broader art.) And yet he later ventures a description of BS as the difference between happiness and misery, succinctly delineating the first (George Stephanopoulos) from the second (Anderson Cooper).

Not shockingly, Mr. Bing’s methodical breakdown of bullshit falls short of his introduction’s mathematical aspirations. Thus the construction-site flag waver (Job No. 26) somehow comes to represent bullshit at its “most aggressive and … satisfying.” Mr. Bing’s, unfortunately, is neither.

The book’s 100 entries blithely inform us on how to enter each profession, its pay, downsides, the skills required and oh so much more—including well-calculated Bullshit Quotients and Borscht Belt routines on famous examples. Here, Mr. Bing has an awful habit of segueing (“not long ago,” “a few years back”) into overweight anecdotes on the issues at hand. We’re constantly told that names have been changed, which nicely reminds us that the onomatopoeic “Bing” is—surprise!—a pseudonym.

His Fortune staff biography (not to mention his write-up at the Greater Talent Network speaker bureau) tells us the man is “an ultra-haute executive vice president at a huge multinational corporation.” There’s no kind of haute like ultra-haute.

Mr. Bing fondly alludes to his significant day job, rattling off a “mind-bogglingly enormous conglomerate” here and a “veritable titan of industry” there.

But like The Office’s wisecracking David Brent, Mr. Bing doggy-paddles in the choppy waters between straight-laced corporate expertise and slapstick satire. It can get ugly, as in awkward invectives against bloggers (Gawker, Drudge and McSweeney’s are lassoed together), hip-hop posses (50 Cent is “Fif”), postmodern art (Jeff Koons is “interesting, not edifying”) and, sadly, divorce lawyers.

Mr. Bing also has Brent’s painful indelicacies. The ceaseless repetition of the book’s scatological keyword gets unseemly: First it’s “pungent,” then “mung,” then “chicken salad out of chicken shit.”

Considering his willingness to put together phrases like “self-important claptrap” (Job No. 1: Advertising Executive), Mr. Bing seems oblivious to his tireless ego. He cutely role-plays as old-school sexist (equating managerial and sexual powers) and homophobe (warning agents against those that “take it up the butt”). His fearless tirade against critics even recounts that “my friend Stanley” hit a New York Times writer after a bad review. Bing! As the man says himself, when it’s impossible to be funny, hateful often suffices.

But even these silliest sucker-punches would be forgivable if the pugilist seemed to be having more fun. (Exclamation points do not count as fun.) Mr. Bing makes so many references to his advances and his agent and his editor and his publisher that it’s no surprise when “Writer of This Book” clocks in at Job No. 96, though it’s thankfully awarded a minimal Bullshit Quotient.

Mr. Bing describes his work as “funny” and “trenchant,” but more cringe-worthy (and pragmatic) is his sales pitch to potential book buyers “reading this while standing up in an airport bookstore.”

Will businessmen bite? It’s hard to imagine that the powerful professional friends of Stanley Bing (his real name is Gil Schwartz) will split their sides on jokes about hairiness and vice presidents. As the slick American attorney tells the slick Helen Mirren in The Long Good Friday: “It’s not a good idea to bullshit us.”

Maybe that’s why the book is at its best when abandoning its corporate hang-ups for pop satire: Mr. Bing takes some sharp jabs at Kevin Federline (though he doesn’t mention “PopoZao”); gives a brilliant history of game-show hosts; and does more to Bill O’Reilly in two pages than Nicholas Lemann’s much longer New Yorker profile.

And then come the October 2005–era jokes on Harriet Miers and FEMA.

Max Abelson is a writer living in New York.

I'm late on everything—I live in the woods—but it interests me because my tribe, Jews, were the first great beneficiaries of the meritocracy: We joined the Establishment thanks to the SAT trifecta. Nicholas Lemann chronicled some of that in The Big Test, a generally fabulous work of reporting and analysis. I say some of it because while Lemann correctly identified the last Tribal Order of the Ruling Class as "the Episcopacy," thereby identifying them not just as WASPs but as Episcopalians, he peeled away from any religio-ethnic identification on the New Ruling Class. In his book he characterized it as a fuzzy rainbow mosaic, Jews, Asian-Americans, other ethnics. That was a bail. The arrival of Jews in the Establishment was clear to anyone who went thru Harvard in the '70s. Jews had podiumed, as they say in the Olympics, and the Jews who had podiumed didn't want to say as much. Might bring negative attention. As if no one had noticed.

Now it really does seem that Asian-Americans have crowded the aisles at the Meritocracy Fairway, and more power to them. Maybe it's a serial meritocracy. A You-go-next kind of thing. Maybe some day these Asian-American kids will exert some equitable influence over our Middle East policy!

He hired Tony Award winner Gregory Mosher to run a program called University Arts Initiatives, which has staged large-scale theatrical productions and recently launched a Web site designed to inform students about the city’s arts scene. Meanwhile, the university’s Miller Theater has emerged as a leading venue for contemporary music, and just last week Mr. Bollinger named a former Museum of Modern Art executive, Jamie Bennett, as his chief of staff.

If that sounds as though Mr. Bollinger is living up to his commitment, critics beg to differ. They are upset over his absence from a conference on campus last May dealing with the role of art and arts research in the city’s development plans. The conference ­attracted an assortment of the city’s cultural overlords, including Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kate D. Levin, Wallace Foundation president Christine DeVita, and Americans for the Arts director Robert Lynch. Mr. Bollinger’s absence was duly noted.

“Anybody involved in policy research about arts and culture was there that day,” said Douglas McLennan, founder of the Web site ArtsJournal.com and a board member of the university’s National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP), which organized the conference.

On its face, NAJP is an esoteric program for mid-career art reviewers on fellowship. But in a market where some say (without irony) that an M.F.A. is the new M.B.A., and where a growing number of universities, including Mr. Bollinger’s direct competitors like Yale and Princeton, are enticing prospective students with expanded arts programs, NAJP took on an importance far beyond its core programming. It became a major arts-policy think tank for the city’s cultural elites.

At the May conference, Dana Gioia, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, joined foundation presidents, culture-policy wonks and Mr. Mosher to gush over the program’s work.

Mr. McLennan accepted their thanks with unexpected dismay.

“Yeah, it’s really great, but this is in fact the NAJP’s last act,” he said.

Just days before the conference, Nicholas Lemann, the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, where the NAJP resided, pulled the plug on the program. He cited a lack of funding after the Pew Charitable Trusts pulled its $4.5 million grant a year before.

Angry board members counter that they had raised enough money to keep the program afloat, and that Mr. Lemann axed it to make room for his own master’s program focusing on the arts.

And what did Mr. Bollinger have to say about the dispute?

“As far as I know, Bollinger was unaware that it was being closed down until the deed had been done,” said Mr. McLennan, echoing the sentiment of other board members who asked to remain anonymous. “He was a nonentity.”

Mr. Bollinger declined to comment, but Mr. Lemann said the decision was made without the president’s input.

“I never had the conversation with Bollinger,” Mr. Lemann said, explaining that he and the university’s provost, Alan Brinkley, made the decision to pull the plug on NAJP.

The abrupt closure of the program not only seemed to contradict Mr. Bollinger’s professed commitment to the arts, but, critics said, it was simply bad business.

Creative, artsy types in advertising, media and fashion have become ever more important to the city’s economy as it tries to end its traditional dependence on finance, insurance and real estate. An increasing number of tuition-paying students, eager to break into those sectors, are seeking arts credentials bestowed by top institutions like Columbia.

But then, Mr. Bollinger hasn’t had an easy time of it since taking over at Columbia.

A noted First Amendment scholar, Mr. Bollinger was brought in from the University of Michigan partly for his managerial skills. Since his installation, he has grappled with charges of anti-Semitism against his Middle Eastern studies department, negotiated with striking graduate students, and faced the taxing and vastly ambitious expansion into a new campus in Morningside Heights. That “Manhattanville” project is expected to cost $4.6 billion, take 25 years to complete and transform the Harlem landscape into an extension of the Columbia campus.

The hiring of Mr. Bollinger, whose high-profile defense of affirmative action at Ann Arbor made him a liberal hero and a conservative pariah, was seen as an attempt to install a sort of anti–Grayson Kirk, the embattled president who had strained relations with the surrounding neighborhood and students in the 1960’s. Instead, supporters believed that Mr. Bollinger would help improve relations with local black leaders, who have historically bristled at Columbia’s attempts to expand.

But Columbia and the community have different visions for what the future should look like.

On Oct. 17, the staff at the Department of City Planning reviewed differences between the community’s wishes and Columbia’s expansion plan. “We urged the parties to enter into a good-faith dialogue to find common ground,” said Rachaele Raynoff, a spokeswoman for the department.

With Mr. Bollinger focusing on all of those tasks and ambitions—even while he meets with the likes of Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama and Kofi Annan—it’s easy to see how the NAJP controversy may have slipped below the radar. Still, critics note that there is a disconnect between killing the NAJP and the university’s plans to build new facilities for the arts as part of its expansion. Some buildings will contain studio and rehearsal spaces to relieve the stately but suffering Dodge Building, the current home of the School of the Arts.

Part of the NAJP’s work was in cultural policy, providing research to public and private institutions to help them plan for arts-development projects.

“An important connection between the university and that aspect of the country’s cultural life was cut,” said Randall Bourscheidt, president of Alliance for the Arts. “It also meant the loss of a partner in convening these forums.”

“It is a significant absence, and one that doesn’t help the city in understanding and supporting cultural activity. No one’s doing it now,” said D. Carroll Joynes, the executive director of the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago. “The university didn’t step up to the plate.”

Or, as the defunct program’s board members have it, Mr. Lemann took advantage of the confusion to get rid of a rival.

The professorial and bespectacled magazine writer wrote a highly positive story about Mr. Bollinger in The New Yorker in 2000. “If you were called upon to invent a perfect university president, you couldn’t do better than Lee Bollinger,” Mr. Lemann wrote. After the piece appeared, Mr. Lemann was brought on board and granted a broad mandate to overhaul the J-school. He set a spring 2005 deadline for NAJP members to come up with the approximately $600,000 needed to keep the program going.

According to Mr. McLennan, about 90 percent of the program’s alumni responded to a letter asking for help and assuring them that their money would be refunded if the rescue effort failed. Those donations totaled about $25,000. An aggressive fund-raising campaign lead by the program’s director, András Szántó, found another $500,000 from private foundations, about $100,000 short of the goal. Board members say Mr. Lemann responded by reprimanding them for raising money, reminding them that they were an advisory, not fiduciary, body. He then noted that the members hadn’t raised enough money to cover administrative costs, so he closed the program.

“There was disappointment and a little bit of anger. The total was close to a million dollars from additional grants that we heard about later,” said Mr. McLennan. “Lemann has ever since claimed that the program was closed for money. The fact is that there was enough money without having Columbia need to put the money up.”

The university sent a letter to the alumni donors months later, thanking them for their donations, which, they were told, went toward the costs of closing the NAJP.

Mr. Lemann counters that he never discouraged the board from raising money and actually went to extraordinary measures to keep the 11-year-old program alive, including lengthy discussions with the board and the Pew and even using money from his discretionary fund.

“What I wanted was to take the money that we had in hand and just size the program down to the amount of money we have available,” said Mr. Lemann, adding that the program’s director refused, despite the fact that it was highly unlikely they could have raised the money in perpetuity. “I feel somewhat annoyed that my reward was them saying I shut the program down.”

Mr. Lemann said that his new master’s program shows that the university is advancing, not retreating, from the arts.

“If we can have, on the side, a policy think tank—it’s nice, but it’s not our core mission,” he said. “If you can’t raise the money, I’ll shut you down.”

Is There a Need?

Some people question whether programs like the NAJP are necessary in a city like New York, where the Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, holds dinners with wealthy friends to convince them to give to struggling cultural organizations.

Frédéric Martel, a French expert on culture policy, said that to a certain extent, private philanthropy in the United States performs the role of Europe’s ministries of culture, because, in part, private foundations decide what gets built.

“The great advantage of the United States is that you can have hundreds of cultural policies,” said Mr. Martel.

But other experts said that research is still necessary to allow decision makers—whether in the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs or at the Ford Foundation—to come to informed conclusions.

“What the NAJP was able to do was put the dialogue on the public radar,” said Robin Keegan, the deputy director of the Center for an Urban Future, a think tank. “Now there is no group that is really facilitating that type of dialogue, bringing the arts community together. There is definitely a void by that group not being around.”

Other institutions are trying to pick up the slack. About 30 students and teachers holding wet umbrellas sat in a New York University auditorium on Oct. 14, listening to Randy Martin, an associate dean and professor of art and public policy at N.Y.U., discuss how “creativity is now the insignia
of entrepreneurialism.”

He said that the lack of coordination in cultural policy at all levels of government means that “it falls to institutions, in particular universities, to set cultural policy.”

“Once we had N.Y.U. president John Sexton and Lee Bollinger from Columbia here, and the hope was they would duke it out to see who could put the most cash on the table for the arts,” Mr. Martin told the crowd. “But they didn’t do that. They are a little bit wiser than that.”

One Columbia student understood that money was always going to be tight for the arts, but wondered how Mr. Bollinger could claim to be its champion.

“If he was the arts president, he’d be coming to the arts events,” said Julian Robinson, a 25-year-old graduate student in film. “I’ve never really known him to come around here.”

He hired Tony Award winner Gregory Mosher to run a program called University Arts Initiatives, which has staged large-scale theatrical productions and recently launched a Web site designed to inform students about the city’s arts scene. Meanwhile, the university’s Miller Theater has emerged as a leading venue for contemporary music, and just last week Mr. Bollinger named a former Museum of Modern Art executive, Jamie Bennett, as his chief of staff.

If that sounds as though Mr. Bollinger is living up to his commitment, critics beg to differ. They are upset over his absence from a conference on campus last May dealing with the role of art and arts research in the city’s development plans. The conference ­attracted an assortment of the city’s cultural overlords, including Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kate D. Levin, Wallace Foundation president Christine DeVita, and Americans for the Arts director Robert Lynch. Mr. Bollinger’s absence was duly noted.

“Anybody involved in policy research about arts and culture was there that day,” said Douglas McLennan, founder of the Web site ArtsJournal.com and a board member of the university’s National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP), which organized the conference.

On its face, NAJP is an esoteric program for mid-career art reviewers on fellowship. But in a market where some say (without irony) that an M.F.A. is the new M.B.A., and where a growing number of universities, including Mr. Bollinger’s direct competitors like Yale and Princeton, are enticing prospective students with expanded arts programs, NAJP took on an importance far beyond its core programming. It became a major arts-policy think tank for the city’s cultural elites.

At the May conference, Dana Gioia, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, joined foundation presidents, culture-policy wonks and Mr. Mosher to gush over the program’s work.

Mr. McLennan accepted their thanks with unexpected dismay.

“Yeah, it’s really great, but this is in fact the NAJP’s last act,” he said.

Just days before the conference, Nicholas Lemann, the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, where the NAJP resided, pulled the plug on the program. He cited a lack of funding after the Pew Charitable Trusts pulled its $4.5 million grant a year before.

Angry board members counter that they had raised enough money to keep the program afloat, and that Mr. Lemann axed it to make room for his own master’s program focusing on the arts.

And what did Mr. Bollinger have to say about the dispute?

“As far as I know, Bollinger was unaware that it was being closed down until the deed had been done,” said Mr. McLennan, echoing the sentiment of other board members who asked to remain anonymous. “He was a nonentity.”

Mr. Bollinger declined to comment, but Mr. Lemann said the decision was made without the president’s input.

“I never had the conversation with Bollinger,” Mr. Lemann said, explaining that he and the university’s provost, Alan Brinkley, made the decision to pull the plug on NAJP.

The abrupt closure of the program not only seemed to contradict Mr. Bollinger’s professed commitment to the arts, but, critics said, it was simply bad business.

Creative, artsy types in advertising, media and fashion have become ever more important to the city’s economy as it tries to end its traditional dependence on finance, insurance and real estate. An increasing number of tuition-paying students, eager to break into those sectors, are seeking arts credentials bestowed by top institutions like Columbia.

But then, Mr. Bollinger hasn’t had an easy time of it since taking over at Columbia.

A noted First Amendment scholar, Mr. Bollinger was brought in from the University of Michigan partly for his managerial skills. Since his installation, he has grappled with charges of anti-Semitism against his Middle Eastern studies department, negotiated with striking graduate students, and faced the taxing and vastly ambitious expansion into a new campus in Morningside Heights. That “Manhattanville” project is expected to cost $4.6 billion, take 25 years to complete and transform the Harlem landscape into an extension of the Columbia campus.

The hiring of Mr. Bollinger, whose high-profile defense of affirmative action at Ann Arbor made him a liberal hero and a conservative pariah, was seen as an attempt to install a sort of anti–Grayson Kirk, the embattled president who had strained relations with the surrounding neighborhood and students in the 1960’s. Instead, supporters believed that Mr. Bollinger would help improve relations with local black leaders, who have historically bristled at Columbia’s attempts to expand.

But Columbia and the community have different visions for what the future should look like.

On Oct. 17, the staff at the Department of City Planning reviewed differences between the community’s wishes and Columbia’s expansion plan. “We urged the parties to enter into a good-faith dialogue to find common ground,” said Rachaele Raynoff, a spokeswoman for the department.

With Mr. Bollinger focusing on all of those tasks and ambitions—even while he meets with the likes of Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama and Kofi Annan—it’s easy to see how the NAJP controversy may have slipped below the radar. Still, critics note that there is a disconnect between killing the NAJP and the university’s plans to build new facilities for the arts as part of its expansion. Some buildings will contain studio and rehearsal spaces to relieve the stately but suffering Dodge Building, the current home of the School of the Arts.

Part of the NAJP’s work was in cultural policy, providing research to public and private institutions to help them plan for arts-development projects.

“An important connection between the university and that aspect of the country’s cultural life was cut,” said Randall Bourscheidt, president of Alliance for the Arts. “It also meant the loss of a partner in convening these forums.”

“It is a significant absence, and one that doesn’t help the city in understanding and supporting cultural activity. No one’s doing it now,” said D. Carroll Joynes, the executive director of the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago. “The university didn’t step up to the plate.”

Or, as the defunct program’s board members have it, Mr. Lemann took advantage of the confusion to get rid of a rival.

The professorial and bespectacled magazine writer wrote a highly positive story about Mr. Bollinger in The New Yorker in 2000. “If you were called upon to invent a perfect university president, you couldn’t do better than Lee Bollinger,” Mr. Lemann wrote. After the piece appeared, Mr. Lemann was brought on board and granted a broad mandate to overhaul the J-school. He set a spring 2005 deadline for NAJP members to come up with the approximately $600,000 needed to keep the program going.

According to Mr. McLennan, about 90 percent of the program’s alumni responded to a letter asking for help and assuring them that their money would be refunded if the rescue effort failed. Those donations totaled about $25,000. An aggressive fund-raising campaign lead by the program’s director, András Szántó, found another $500,000 from private foundations, about $100,000 short of the goal. Board members say Mr. Lemann responded by reprimanding them for raising money, reminding them that they were an advisory, not fiduciary, body. He then noted that the members hadn’t raised enough money to cover administrative costs, so he closed the program.

“There was disappointment and a little bit of anger. The total was close to a million dollars from additional grants that we heard about later,” said Mr. McLennan. “Lemann has ever since claimed that the program was closed for money. The fact is that there was enough money without having Columbia need to put the money up.”

The university sent a letter to the alumni donors months later, thanking them for their donations, which, they were told, went toward the costs of closing the NAJP.

Mr. Lemann counters that he never discouraged the board from raising money and actually went to extraordinary measures to keep the 11-year-old program alive, including lengthy discussions with the board and the Pew and even using money from his discretionary fund.

“What I wanted was to take the money that we had in hand and just size the program down to the amount of money we have available,” said Mr. Lemann, adding that the program’s director refused, despite the fact that it was highly unlikely they could have raised the money in perpetuity. “I feel somewhat annoyed that my reward was them saying I shut the program down.”

Mr. Lemann said that his new master’s program shows that the university is advancing, not retreating, from the arts.

“If we can have, on the side, a policy think tank—it’s nice, but it’s not our core mission,” he said. “If you can’t raise the money, I’ll shut you down.”

Is There a Need?

Some people question whether programs like the NAJP are necessary in a city like New York, where the Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, holds dinners with wealthy friends to convince them to give to struggling cultural organizations.

Frédéric Martel, a French expert on culture policy, said that to a certain extent, private philanthropy in the United States performs the role of Europe’s ministries of culture, because, in part, private foundations decide what gets built.

“The great advantage of the United States is that you can have hundreds of cultural policies,” said Mr. Martel.

But other experts said that research is still necessary to allow decision makers—whether in the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs or at the Ford Foundation—to come to informed conclusions.

“What the NAJP was able to do was put the dialogue on the public radar,” said Robin Keegan, the deputy director of the Center for an Urban Future, a think tank. “Now there is no group that is really facilitating that type of dialogue, bringing the arts community together. There is definitely a void by that group not being around.”

Other institutions are trying to pick up the slack. About 30 students and teachers holding wet umbrellas sat in a New York University auditorium on Oct. 14, listening to Randy Martin, an associate dean and professor of art and public policy at N.Y.U., discuss how “creativity is now the insignia of entrepreneurialism.”

He said that the lack of coordination in cultural policy at all levels of government means that “it falls to institutions, in particular universities, to set cultural policy.”

“Once we had N.Y.U. president John Sexton and Lee Bollinger from Columbia here, and the hope was they would duke it out to see who could put the most cash on the table for the arts,” Mr. Martin told the crowd. “But they didn’t do that. They are a little bit wiser than that.”

One Columbia student understood that money was always going to be tight for the arts, but wondered how Mr. Bollinger could claim to be its champion.

“If he was the arts president, he’d be coming to the arts events,” said Julian Robinson, a 25-year-old graduate student in film. “I’ve never really known him to come around here.”

The school is scheduled to embrace its first flock of 50 students in the fall of 2006, will grow to a maximum of 200 students in its first three to four years, and will come with a price tag of approximately $5,400 to $7,100 per year, based on the current cost of a year of in-state graduate tuition at CUNY.

"You know, the City University people tell me there is no publicly funded graduate journalism school in the entire Northeast," said Mr. Shepard, 65, in a phone interview on Tuesday afternoon from his office at BusinessWeek. "We will have what I hope will be a very good, distinguished journalism school with relatively low tuition. Which will attract people who otherwise wouldn't be able to go to a graduate school of journalism."

The school will be housed in the old New York Herald Tribune building, on West 41st Street, although many details remain to be worked out about the program, including the length (programs of one year and up are being considered) and the precise cost and curriculum. But the fact that CUNY's tuition will be many magnitudes lower than the $35,000-plus sticker on a year at Columbia Journalism School or in the N.Y.U. Journalism Department throws the cost-benefit analysis of those programs into uncomfortable relief.

"I think it's true that it's expensive," said Mitchell Stephens, the interim chair of the N.Y.U. Journalism Department, referring to his own program. "It's a year and a half, three semesters, in a career that's going to last 50 years. And we hope that it's money well spent."

"Let's just answer by analogy," said Nicholas Lemann, the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, when asked what enticement Columbia would have to offer. "If you wanted to be a lawyer, and you were admitted to City University and one of their schools, or Columbia Law School, you'd go to City University, wouldn't you?"

"Almost all of our students are taking out student loans to go here," Mr. Lemann continued. "We are very aggressively fund-raising, with the primary goal of raising scholarship money. That will drive down, I hope, the effective cost of going here. I would say, though, that you don't often find a low-cost, public university that is able to draw meaningful numbers of accepted students away from an elite private university. And if it is able to do so, it says that the elite private university is doing something wrong and needs to offer a more meaningful deal to its students. That shouldn't happen."

Ultimately, Mr. Lemann said, the new program would be helpful.

"If CUNY is a meaningful competitor, it means we've got to work a little harder," said Mr. Lemann. "It makes it easier for me to fund-raise, because I can say to our funders that we're losing students to them, and use that to increase the size of the scholarship pot. So if I had that argument available to me, that'd be great."

In fact, the CUNY school may be alluring to an entirely new pool of applicants, who otherwise might not consider journalism graduate school due to the prohibitive cost and relatively low starting salaries in the profession, auguring years of debt. Which may only serve to increase and diversify the batch of fresh young, aspiring journalists released into the profession's bloodstream every spring, who go on to compete for jobs in print, cable and network television, and online news.

"Look, Columbia is an outstanding school," said Mr. Shepard, who has taught there and served on the school's Board of Visitors. "It's just that there's room for more than one. It's silly to think that you can only have one model, and only one kind of school. There are plenty of students who are very, very good and want a good journalism education in New York City, and we will offer an option."

As for BusinessWeek, where Mr. Shepard has been editor in chief for 20 years, most people have been "extremely nice," according to Mr. Shepard. The search for a successor is "well along," and Mr. Shepard said they should be able to announce somebody fairly soon.

"It's tough for me, it's been a part of my life for a long time," said Mr. Shepard. "The weekly rhythm has been part of my DNA. But it's time, and I think this is a very, very worthwhile thing to do."

Mr. Shepard is also a proud product of the public school system.

"I grew up in the Bronx, I went to public schools: the [Bronx] High School of Science, City College, then Columbia," said Mr. Shepard. "I played stickball in the streets."

"I'm a New York City kid," he said. "So this stirs my soul."

Inside the Condé Nast mother ship on Times Square, staffers at Cargo, the men's shopping magazine, are closing the February 2005 issue, their first since becoming a monthly. Increasing the number of issues from six to 10 a year is all part of James Truman's campaign to recreate the success that Lucky magazine has had: amassing an army of 1 million shopping-addicted readers.

As the title progressed over the past year from prototype to bimonthly to monthly, and as readers have given the catalog-magazine (the trendy term is "magalog") concept a hearty bear hug, the little known story is that putting out a magazine such as Cargo may be one of the toughest jobs in the New York media world.

The magalog jobs have certainly created a new breed in the Condé Nast tower, where most New Yorkers picture a well-manicured set that line-edits 5,000-word think-pieces by cherished novelists in the feature well on a two-month deadline, (between nips down to the Four Seasons to sip martinis and pick over the occasional beef carpaccio).

As the production schedule has tightened (the announcement that Cargo would go monthly came in May), Cargo's had a bit of a molting. Not unusual one year into a new magazine's run, to be sure. But all of the subjects interviewed by The Observer echoed the same sentiment about why they or colleagues had left: The magalog is a tough place to work, with long hours and little writerly satisfaction in the meticulously combed-over copy.

This summer and into the fall, Mediabistro's Revolving Door newsletter swelled with names of Cargo staffers on the way in and out. Among the recent émigrés listed were former style editor Daniel Ou, who is now installed at real-life catalog Abercrombie and Fitch after leaving the magazine in July, and former senior editor Sam Grobart, now an assistant news editor at The Wall Street Journal's Weekend Journal. More recently, former products editor Sonia Zjawinski left for Budget Living in October, the same month fashion writer Mike Albo left to write a book. And Barbara Reyes, formerly the magazine's art director, exited in November and will soon be starting a position at Teen People.

"I think the biggest challenge is, at the end of the day we're recommending something that somebody is spending their money on, that they're going to enjoy or not," said Ariel Foxman, Cargo's editor in chief. "What that means for a magazine like Cargo, which covers so many things, is that we need to have expert hubs of editorial people who know every category. Either on staff or outside editors. That's the biggest challenge." Mr. Foxman did not think that staff turnover at Cargo had been higher than at any other "healthy magazine."

These Cargo categories of expertise run the spectrum of 21st-century male desires: gadgets, grooming, cars, culture and fashion. Shepherding this product knowledge onto the page has taken its toll on Cargo staffers, as the magazine has recently witnessed its first wave of turnover on the middle of the masthead.

Some former Cargo staffers share Mr. Foxman's assessment of the challenges of becoming a monthly expert in every product under the sun, recommending items culled from a list and writing the accompanying captions to justify their presence in the magazine. That, combined with the frenzied start-up magazine atmosphere which eschews the privilege and comfort of having editorial assistants handling daily tedium that is common to many publications in their early stages, led some to both excitement and burnout.

"In a way, it's almost harder to write 40 words about something than 400," said Mr. Grobart, now installed in his Weekend Journal post at The Wall Street Journal. "I was responsible for a lot of technology coverage. You're not only trying to show someone a new product, but you're trying to educate them about it, without talking down to the reader. When you're dealing with all this information, you have to find a way to distill it so it's clear and also entertaining. It's very challenging."

At outfits like Cargo, products must be corralled from manufacturers to the writers to test and photographers to shoot. Captions are pored over and scrutinized with a laser-like focus. All of the "shopping," presumed to be dreaded by Cargo's male readers, is done instead by editors and, where they exist, assistants.

"In a shopping magazine, suddenly you have to be an expert in five things that you don't really know. You have to really research," said Mr. Ou, who said that he enjoyed his year as a style editor at Cargo. "Let's say you're doing a story on iPod cases. You have to get all the best ones, expensive to cheap, all the different price points, all across the country, put them in a little presentation and go over them with the editor. And let's say you have 100 different ones, but maybe you don't have a wide array of cheap ones, or maybe the colors aren't right. You have to go out there and look for more. There's a lot of trial and error involved. And for every issue there's 10 new things, so it's just really time-consuming."

Another former staffer recalled having to dash off to a store to locate multiple copies of a product in the middle of the day when a photo shoot was rescheduled at the final minute and the test products hadn't been shipped from the manufacturer yet.

"Luckily, I had my corporate credit card," he said.

Thank God for Condé Nast!

On top of that, sustaining relationships with all the product manufacturers involves going out to parties and product launches, fielding an endless parade of publicist calls, C.E.O. lunches and look-sees, that fills much of staffers' out-of-the-office hours.

Mr. Foxman said that he didn't feel that there was more labor involved in a magazine such as Cargo than at other titles, and that the business-social obligations were similar to those at a places such as Vanity Fair, where editors might spend evenings at movie premieres, schmoozing with potential cover subjects.

"I think our magazine is as much work as any other magazine, not less," he said. "I appreciate the hard work that people have put into the magazine, and I think our readers appreciate it. As far as I'm concerned, their great work has really shown through, at the same time, its' a pretty smooth evolution. For the most part, people understood that we were in this together, that we would hash it out, but for the most part, it's very typical of a launch.

"It's not an intense environment," Mr. Foxman continued. "People do their work, they work really hard, they do their pages. It's not intense in the sense that it's not doable. There's a level of expertise not only that the reader demands, but that the company demands. This is very serious business, telling people how to spend their money."

For the first time in the history of the meritocracy, the government has embraced an alternative value, and a superior value, to the measurement of IQ (which is what SAT's do) as the basis for judging young people. Diversity in leadership is so important, the court said, that it is worth discriminating against the brainy in order to achieve it.

The last time the court upheld affirmative-action policies, 25 years ago in the Bakke case, affirmative action was offered as a kind of narrow exception to general standards, a way of making up for past discrimination against blacks. This time, Sandra Day O'Connor's majority opinion dispensed with civil-rights talk. Her language had a more general, positive and populist lilt.

"In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity," she wrote. "All members of our heterogeneous society must have confidence in the openness and integrity of the educational institutions" that create those pathways.

While it is true that Justice O'Connor made a point of refusing to abandon standardized tests and grade-point averages, she upheld the idea of a "holistic" assessment of an individual's talents, an assessment in which "many other diversity factors besides race" are taken into account.

That's where this opinion is so refreshing. It throws opens the back door on the meritocracy and suggests that a lot of other values that the intelligent have diminished-from religious study, to experience as a laborer, to athleticism, to a rural background-may one day have a place in assigning room in the hatchery.

Dahlia Lithwick wrote sharply on Slate that the Supreme Court would make schools into petting zoos. That's funny, but it's a rather empty argument, suggesting that intellectual elitists really have little to justify their own supremacy beyond the undisputed fact that they are an elite.

There was a time when that elite could make a substantive claim to position. As Nicholas Lemann showed in his startling history of the meritocracy, The Big Test (1999), the SAT gained its place as a gateway to status through the efforts of high-minded men who believed that science had at last enabled the nation to choose a natural aristocracy of the public-spirited. Instead of the wealthy and patrician, the country would now be able to select a natural aristocracy of leaders who were "deserving, selfless, valuable, and dedicated to the public good."

The system was adopted with virtually no public debate, Mr. Lemann writes, pushed by a private company, the Educational Testing Service, that had a strong commercial interest in the enterprise, and by schools that jumped at the opportunity to make themselves more important.

Today, the old ideal of this elite as deserving, selfless, valuable and dedicated to the public good is simply laughable. The intelligent are just as greedy as anyone else. A group of medical colleges that filed a brief with the Supreme Court pointed out that minority doctors were more likely than whites to serve in underprivileged communities.

About the only claim that the elite can stake for themselves is that they are valuable. But you don't have to go to divinity school to wonder whether valuable means deserving.

"Would you design the American meritocracy as it now exists?" Mr. Lemann asks. "You would only if you believed that IQ test scores and, more broadly, academic performance are the same thing as merit …. Merit is various, not unidimensional." IQ tests don't select for originality, toughness, humor, empathy or wisdom.

Right-as the New Agey O'Connor says, they're not holistic, they're not open.

Then there's the culture of the meritocracy. The sharpest attack on the world the meritocrats have made was published last year by Toby Young in his media memoir, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People . The son of Michael Young, who invented the term "meritocracy" in his 1958 best-seller The Rise of the Meritocracy , Toby Young came over from England to New York in the 90's and got a job at Vanity Fair .

He came to see the meritocrats as a "self-perpetuating upper middle class" ruling class that had invested its rise with an air of social justice, thereby legitimizing "abhorrent levels of inequality" and toxic snobbery.

"The casual, unthinking cruelty with which successful New Yorkers treat cab drivers and waiters, not to mention their personal assistants, was something I witnessed every day," Mr. Young wrote.

Lacking adult SAT's, meritocrats have to find other ways of sorting one another out. The methods are often less than inspired. The only personal assistants Mr. Young saw promoted during three years at Vanity Fair were Patricia Herrera and Evgenia Peretz, the daughters of Carolina Herrera, the designer, and Marty Peretz, the publisher.

I made a related point in this space a couple of years back: that in the upper reaches of achievement culture, the real division is between fuck-ups and suck-ups. Hypocrisies of this sort made Mr. Young nostalgic for English caste, where there is no claim to fairness, but whose members are more content and self-effacing. Of course, Americans would never accept such a system, and shouldn't. We sanctify opportunity, and the meritocracy has spread opportunity across two generations, though the winners now seem determined to pass on their victories to their children.

This is probably the most dispiriting thing about the meritocratic leadership: Its membership has become so predictable. They live in a few coastal cultural capitals, in a stuffy echo chamber of privilege.

Meritocrats make fun of George W. Bush because he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. But are the meritocrats really any better? Only a handful of people, they say, even deserve to be on the field.

At least the old elite had an ethos of noblesse oblige, an acknowledgment of the fact that the system was unfair. The meritocrats' ethos is to worship success and disdain failure, and meantime the gap between the rich and the poor gets wider and wider.

Anyone who lives outside the "trifecta" of Washington, New York and Los Angeles, Mr. Young observes, is thought to belong to some inferior species. The conservative David Brooks made the same point on television, in attacking the O'Connor decision. Put aside blacks and whites for a moment, he said, and look at the divide between the reds and blues of the last election. What about that diversity? he said.

Well, exactly, The red-blue map shows one fault line in the meritocracy with geographical precision-blue winners concentrated around sophisticated cities, red losers in provincial areas. But I believe Mr. Brooks too can find comfort in the Arizonan Supreme Court justice's call for openness. Reds might now argue for having their own "critical mass" in the pathways to leadership. How many students at Harvard Law School believe in the Second Amendment?

The road map away from the meritocracy is likely to be supplied by lower-status groups.

The biggest influence on the court's decision seems to have been a brief filed by military officers arguing that diversity was a matter of national security. Back in the 1960's, when the officer corps was all white, there was rebellion, riot and murder among the troops, the brief said, and the officer corps didn't understand why at first. Don't reverse that trend, the retired officers told the court.

Even Antonin Scalia seemed to abandon his usual sarcasm on this point. During the oral arguments in the case, he agreed that there should be a "reasonable number" of black officers. What is reasonable? What is critical mass? Justice O'Connor and four other judges then gave these ideas a moral underpinning.

There are other democratic examples beside the military. As I write this article, in a guest house in the South Pacific, a new group of Peace Corps volunteers has arrived to begin two years of service. Over 40 years, the Peace Corps has learned to pick good volunteers, and I can see the winning qualities in these young people. They're humble, energetic, open and unpretentious. Some seem able to live in the moment, and almost all of them are smart, too. How did the meritocracy get it so wrong?