Founder Ron Meyer sold “The Shire”—named for a fictional area of Middle Earth inhabited exclusively by hobbits in the J.R.R Tolkien novels—to Jan McDonald in June, after attracting a lot of media attention and tourists, but only one buyer since 2006.

The 6-acre community is built in an “English Country Village architectural style around contemporary floor plans," according to The Shire Web site; is governed by a set of bylaws called the “Declaration of Interdependence”; has a central area called the "Ring Bearer's Court"; and has homes like the 3,200-square-foot "Butterfly Cottage," complete with a “hobbit hole” in the backyard to store garden supplies, listed for $899,900.

Mr. McDonald is trying to sell The Shire's 14 developed lots, one house, and additional land before the bank puts them on the auction block in December.

The votes in Kentucky and Oregon are the last Democratic contests scheduled before a May 31 meeting of the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, a panel that figures to return to the obscurity it richly deserves as soon as this campaign is over. At the May 31 session, the 30-member committee will hear challenges from Democrats in Michigan and Florida, who were stripped by the national party of their convention delegates for scheduling their primaries in violation of the D.N.C.’s calendar.

The Clinton campaign, which according to media reports has at least 13 supporters on the committee, badly wants the panel to rule in favor of both states, where she won outlaw primaries back in January.

Such a decision would have several effects. For one, it would cut Obama’s lead among pledged delegates. It would also expand the overall pool of convention delegates by several hundred (depending on whether both states’ delegations were seated completely or just partially), thereby increasing the number of magic number of delegates needed to win the nomination from 2,026, where it now sits, and creating more distance between Obama and outright victory. Also, by seating Florida and Michigan, the panel might lend credibility to Clinton’s claims of an advantage in the overall popular vote, which she bases on the inclusion of both states (especially Michigan, where Obama’s name wasn’t on the ballot).

At best for the Clinton forces (meaning full representation for Michigan and Florida based on the January results), the delegate magic number would swell to 2,209, while Obama, as of Monday night, has just over 1,900 pledged and superdelegates. At the current pace, he is likely to need only a handful of superdelegates once the final primaries in South Dakota and Montana are held to put him over the top. With Florida and Michigan in the mix, he would need more, and the process could take longer and, depending on how the Clintons play it, it could get messy.

Which brings us to the potential importance of Oregon and, to a lesser degree, Kentucky. An impressive showing by Obama on Tuesday will only hasten the steady (though not yet overwhelming) flow of uncommitted superdelegates into his camp, something that would give him more leverage heading into the end-of-May meeting, at the expense of Clinton. In effect, a flood of superdelegates to Obama between now and then could position him to push for a compromise on the Michigan and Florida issues that would remove the issue once and for all from the public arena. And that, almost certainly, would hasten the end of the Clinton challenge.

The best bet right now is that Obama will win a double-digit victory in Oregon while suffering a West Virgina-esque drubbing in Kentucky, where he barely campaigned in an effort to downplay expectations. Thanks to proportional allocation, he’ll easily collect enough pledged delegates on the day to claim an outright pledged delegate majority for the primary season (based on numbers that don’t include Florida and Michigan).

If Oregon and Kentucky produce the expected results – or if Clinton does better than expected in Oregon – Obama probably won’t pick up the superdelegates he needs to claim outright victory by May 31. And if that’s the case, his forces will have no choice but to enter that meeting in a defensive crouch, seeking to deny Clinton the media victory and talking points that would come with seating the delegations. Even if they were to succeed, they’d pay a price: With Michigan and Florida unseated, Clinton could continue to threaten to take her campaign all the way to the convention.

But if Obama were to fare significantly better than expected on Tuesday – perhaps a 20-point win in Oregon and finishing within 15 points of Clinton in Kentucky – the superdelegate floodgates could open, with the party’s elders finally feeling safe in declaring the race over.

This new support would essentially serve as Obama’s insurance policy at the meeting. Suddenly, he’d be in position to take a magnanimous posture, with his new superdelegate support providing padding to absorb whatever gains Clinton would make through a compromise on Florida and Michigan. Instead of fighting the idea of seating the delegations at all (and tabling the issue until later in the summer, or even the convention itself), Obama could be positioned to advocate a reasonable compromise that would win over the panel’s uncommitted members (neither Clinton nor Obama now has a majority on the Rules and Bylaws Committee) and kill the dispute once and for all.

The superdelegate onslaught that Obama needs to make this happen could come even if he doesn’t exceed expectations tomorrow. Maybe the superdelegates will still be swayed by his claim of a pledged delegate majority. But the argument will be a lot more compelling if the Democratic voters of Oregon and Kentucky send a clear message that they, too, are ready for this to be over.

The impulse to lump these two novels together is understandable, since Heidi Julavits and Vendela Vida are co-founders of The Believer (a literary journal I’ve written for—just once.) But there’s actually very little evidence to support the notion of a shared Aesthetica Julavida. The Uses of Enchantment, which was published in October, is dense, multilayered and satiric, while Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name is spare, linear and solemn.

Readers first became aware of Heidi Julavits in 1998 when Esquire published “Marry the One Who Gets There First: Outtakes from the Sheidegger-Krupnik Wedding Album,” a short story so vivid that I still remember certain scenes eight years after wolfing it down. But even those of us who’ve been fans of her writing ever since might be surprised by the richness and complexity on display in The Uses of Enchantment.

The new novel opens on the playing fields of a prep school in suburban Boston in 1985, a milieu rendered so precisely that I was slapped back to my own miserable high-school years (Milton, ’86). Mary Veal, a junior at Semmering Academy, goes AWOL during a field-hockey rain delay, gets into a 1975 Mercedes (cue image of the classic bubble-nosed sedan) and disappears without a trace. Six weeks later, she resurfaces, claiming to have no recollection of what happened to her. Psychiatric experts are called in, and soon Mary’s amnesia is seen for what it is—a ruse.

But why would a teenage girl fake her own abduction? One strand of the book is devoted to raising, and then discrediting, possible answers to that question, as Mary’s case becomes a hotly contested power grab between two therapists, each looking to promote their own pet theories at a time when recovered memories of sexual abuse were all the rage. Some of the most hilarious scenes come from the notes of Mary’s analyst as he struggles to pin down his clever, manipulative client. “She made direct eye contact with me—a confusing sign of ego defiance that did not coincide with the earlier abuse theory,” Dr. Hammer writes. “Typically when a patient lashes out at her doctor, she does so without the ability to make concurrent eye contact; to do so would mean taking responsibility for her actions. But Mary suffered no shame; in fact she appeared exultant. You seem to be insulting me, I said.” God knows how many psychoanalytic workbooks Ms. Julavits had to slog through—or how many couches she had to lie on, for that matter—to pull off such a great send-up of the talking cure.

Dr. Hammer publishes a book called Miriam: The Disappearance of a New England Girl, but Mary’s cover is quickly blown and she becomes the pariah of her family, school and town. Fifteen years later, after moving to Oregon, Mary is forced to go back home by the death of her mother, a formidable figure from whom Mary had desperately sought forgiveness. Her crabby, conspiring sisters and her alcoholic aunt make it clear that, in their eyes, Mary will always be the black sheep, but a discovery among her mother’s papers sends her on a search to find out just how well her mother understood her after all. Despite all Mary’s defensive cleverness, her feints and dodges and verbal jousting, her quest for redemption seems real and heartfelt.

IN LET THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ERASE YOUR NAME, Vendela Vida explores a culture far away from Boston’s WASP-y suburbs. The title is taken from a poem written by a Sami, the indigenous people of the Arctic region in Scandinavia where Ms. Vida herself has family and where her protagonist, Clarissa Iverton, goes to track down the secret of her parentage. Clarissa has just discovered that the man who raised her and whom she’d called Dad was not her biological father. What’s more, when Clarissa was 14, her mother, who seemed to love stray cats more than her own children, disappeared from a mall in upstate New York, abandoning her family for good. “In preceding weeks, my mother had been unusually affectionate toward me. I wasn’t sure how long it would last, her warmth, so I followed it like a sunbather at dusk, chasing the sun,” she remembers.

Now a young adult, Clarissa renews her chase all the way to Lapland, where her mother went to research her dissertation before Clarissa was born. The failings of her loved ones, it seems, have hardened Clarissa. “Travel is made for liars. Or liars are made by travel,” she thinks when she arrives in Helsinki and a local asks her why she’s there and she answers that her fiancé just died—a fabrication. “I had given a different explanation to the Belgian deejay sitting next to me on the flight from New York to Brussels. She grated on my nerves, and I wasn’t sure why. She was too eager, too loud, and I decided I could be mean to her. ‘Do you think that’s the Great Lakes?’ she asked, looking over me and out the window. Two hours earlier, we had departed eastward out of Kennedy.”

As Clarissa travels farther and farther north into sunlessness, she begins to uncover clues that her teenage hunch had been true—she had inadvertently driven away her mother. But with these revelations come elisions: At each dramatic moment, more seems to be left unsaid than said.

Harsh, cold landscapes blanketed in snow and Laplanders speaking broken English are a perfect match for Ms. Vida’s economical, though not humorless, prose—more fitting, in fact, than the Manhattan portrayed in her first novel, And Now You Can Go (2004).

Heidi Julavits is a show-stopping maximalist compared with Vendela Vida, whose elegant restraint is sometimes a little too unflinching. If these books are any indication, the artistic reservoir beneath The Believer runs both deep and wide.

Ruth Davis Konigsberg writes for Elle and is at work on her first book.

Among the shocking findings: One top county official was too wrapped up in an Oregon State football game to come in and look for the lost family, a week after they went missing. And for two days as James Kim staggered dying in the forest, and authorities knew his whereabouts, no one thought to deploy helicopters that were available that had heat-seeking equipment that might have located him. (The same technology used in the last couple days on Mt. Hood.)

Here are some excerpts:

Three days later, James Kim's body was found.

SUV ads treat the outdoors like a tame pussycat. SUVs can go anywhere off-road. No, the Saab 9-2X isn't an SUV, but All-Wheel-Drive for a family in San Francisco? Why did the Kims think that they could make it on a seasonal road approaching 4,000 feet in the Siskiyou National Forest? What ads had they been watching?

And now here comes Suzanne Hansen, an erstwhile lactation consultant and labor/delivery nurse and married mother of two who’s written a tell-all about her time (a couple of decades ago) as nanny for the former super-agent Mike Ovitz and his family. Her pretty, pink-covered, palm-tree-bedecked book mushes together two subgenres: the inexplicably unstoppable category of “assistant lit,” like The Devil Wears Prada; and the jaded Hollywood homily—hence the title, a reference to the late producer Julia Phillips’ big hit You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again (1991).

You’ll Never Nanny is scads less cynical—and far more lightweight—than its namesake. Ms. Hansen arrives in La-La Land as a wide-eyed adolescent from Cottage Grove, Ore. (“a cross between Dodge City in the 1800s and Mayberry from The Andy Griffith Show”), having matriculated at the shabby Northwest Nannies Institute because she lacked career direction and, you know, always sorta liked baby-sitting. She’s a bit hung up on her hick of a high-school boyfriend, Ryan, and misses her “Norman Rockwell painting” upbringing—but she’s hungry to explore the glamour of Tinseltown. Imagine her surprise when she discovers the real seedy Los Angeles (a rite of passage for outsiders that’s perpetually diverting to us residents): Oh my God, what’s with all the mini-malls? Where are all the movie stars? How can you stand this … smog?

After a placement agency sends her on a few amusing false starts, Ms. Hansen lands what seems to be a dream gig with Mr. Ovitz, his wife, Judy, and their three children: a stubborn brat named Josh; an only slightly less stubborn brat, Amanda; and an adorable baby, Brandon, whose mother has seemingly never administered a 4 a.m. feeding nor followed through on a time-out. Unbelievably, the savvy power couple fails to draw up any sort of written contract for their new employee (was she paid off the books, one wonders? This was before Kimba Wood), an arrangement that leaves Ms. Hansen underpaid, dissatisfied, and scribbling feverishly and frequently into her diary—or “journaling” as she puts it—about life chez Ovitz, with one-liners like “Me working here is like trying to mix Metamucil in water—I never fully blend.” The savvy power couple also apparently neglected to draw up a nondisclosure agreement.

Like Bridget Jones and a flock of other scatty chick-lit heroines before her, Ms. Hansen has a remarkable tendency to get into scrapes—sometimes quite literally, as when she plunges headfirst down the slide of the family swimming pool during a stolen nighttime swim, hitting the bricks of the deck and “hurtling through the short length of the pool like a torpedo launched from a nuclear submarine,” ending up with a wound that demands eight stitches. Then there’s the time she borrows a housekeeper’s Chevy truck on the way to a game-show audition (only in L.A., kids) and ignores a parking-structure sign that reads “maximum clearance 8 feet 6 inches.” Or the time she trips hurrying to catch a flight out of Eugene, sending tampons and loose change and self spewing across the tarmac, to the raucous amusement of the waiting passengers.

The Ovitzes, meanwhile, come off as variously clueless (“How do you put him to bed?” asks Mrs. O. re Brandon); crass (she lets Josh pee on a front-lawn tree); cheap (though Disney head Michael Eisner proves even cheaper, sending stuffed Mickey and Minnie Mouses as an anniversary present); and downright cruel: “You make a good coat rack,” remarks the imperious employeress, piling ski paraphernalia on poor Suzy so the family can take a photo op sans nanny in Aspen, during a trip which leaves Ms. Hansen feeling like “the Griswolds’ Aunt Edna in Vacation.” Mr. O. emerges somewhat more sympathetically: worrying that his own kids don’t recognize him; impressing the impressionable Suzy with his wardrobe and unflappable mien (“his very being demands respect,” she “journals” a bit moonily, “maybe it’s because he’s always so impeccably dressed”); procuring her and a friend dinner reservations at Spago; and even occasionally taking her child-rearing wisdom seriously—to the intense displeasure of his wife, of course. One can’t help feeling that the young Ms. Hansen was something of a doormat for the overbearing Ovitzes. Why doesn’t she just quit? you wonder, again and again.

Eventually, she does quit. Predictably, Mr. O. threatens to make it impossible for her ever to work for an entertainment figure again, but she manages to find two more bearable posts: helping dedicated mommy Debra Winger (a staunch proponent of breastfeeding); then tending to the jolly brood of the diminutive duo Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman.

Ms. Hansen isn’t a bad writer. And thanks to her keen memory and nattering network of friends in the nannysphere, the book is full of celebrity cameos (Dustin Hoffman is cranky during a private movie screening! Tom Cruise, né Mapother, is nice on a phone call to an Ovitz child!), not to mention transparent blind items: Gee, wonder who “the daughter of a famous dead rock star and a certifiably crazy mother whose nanny actually wanted to adopt her because she feared for her safety when her mother was on a drug binge” might be? This stuff might have passed for delicious in the People-magazine era of 20 years ago, but at a time when gossip about the famous is measured and digested in gigabytes to the second, it feels about as fresh as warmed-over formula.

Alexandra Jacobs is features editor of The Observer.

“The only other major industry that has more bankruptcies, on a percentage basis, is the restaurant business,” said Richard Gritta, a professor of finance at the University of Portland in Oregon whom The New York Times uses as an expert. In the last 25 years or so, the professor added, two-thirds of the industry has landed in bankruptcy at least once, and three—Pan Am, Eastern and Braniff—never made it out alive.

From the standpoint of airline investors, according to a remark attributed to Warren Buffett, it would have been a far, far better thing if the Wright brothers had crashed and burned at Kitty Hawk. Since the industry was freed of government supervision in 1978, it has had brilliant executives, stupid executives, madmen executives, ingenious executives, incompetent executives, charismatic executives, but never a profitable one. Oh, there have been brief periods when an airline here or there has made money, but sooner or later they all go kerplop.

When they do, the stockholders will be wiped out and the employees will take terrible hits in salary and benefits, even as the taxpayers will be obliged to put up huge sums to make the whole thing work—or kinda-sorta work—again. The only people who profit from these airline business catastrophes are the lawyers, accountants and Wall Street investment-banking houses who will pick up hundreds of millions (literally hundreds of millions) in fees and charges before this latest airline spasm has run its course. Seldom will so few have made so much for doing so little.

This disaster is not unprecedented. A hundred years ago, the railroad industry was in exactly the same shape. More than half of its trackage was in bankruptcy—and for some of the same reasons that have made a ruin of the airline companies. Both industries had to deal with huge up-front starting costs. Both industries faced large operating costs and fickle, unpredictable and highly variable patronage.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, railroad companies besieged by angry customers—mostly farmers furious at the rates they had to pay to move their products to market—reacted by forming cartels to fix freight tariffs, but the cartel members would continually double-cross each other, so that approach didn’t work. Another attempt came with the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission, which had the power to fix rates and other terms of doing business, but the commission became a battleground between the railroad and the shipping interests, with the result that political pressures made it impossible to govern the industry for its long-term health. As a last resort, railroad companies had recourse to buying each other out to create enough of a monopoly to be able to dictate prices. This approach failed when even the giants of the era, like J.P. Morgan, ran out of money trying to pull it off. It didn’t help that Morgan had no background in transportation and thus didn’t have a clue what the hell he was doing. The monopoly route was also stymied by giant shippers like Andrew Carnegie, who put the railroads on notice that if they tried to hold him up with what he thought were extortionate rates, he’d build his own goddamn railroad.

The airline mess has also been compounded by much malarkey filling the air about “private sector” this and “free market” that. Right-wing egestions hold that until the coming of closet collectivism, government stayed out of the private sector, an area of life unsullied by any form of public subsidy or subvention. Left-wing disgorgements hold that any kind of public help is corporate welfare. All of this flies in the face of the history of business in the United States, where subsidies in transportation have been the rule, not the exception.

The Federal-era stagecoach network was subsidized through the Post Office, as the airline companies would be two centuries later. Stagecoaches were useless for hauling freight, especially bulk shipments of grain from the rapidly developing Midwest. It would have been convenient if the rivers had run from west to east to facilitate transshipment to the markets of Europe, but since geography wouldn’t cooperate, Americans dug canals, mostly paid for by state and local governments. The most famous and most wildly successful was the Erie Canal, and from Albany to Buffalo, nary a complaint about socialism was to be heard.

The railroad gradually superseded the canals as the primary method of shipping. They too were the beneficiaries of a variety of federal, state and local subsidies. Next came the automobile and the truck, whose subsidies in the form of roads, bridges and tunnels are so much a part of the landscape that we seldom think of them as subsidies, but as the natural, God-given responsibility of government. It wasn’t so in 1914, when the Wilson administration put the federal government in the road-building business for the first time since Andrew Jackson’s era, when such activities were pronounced unconstitutional. Only now, when the costs of road building and maintenance has gotten to the point that some states are granting toll-road monopolies to private firms, has it occurred to us that this form of transportation is highly subsidized, even with the dedicated gas tax.

The airline industry has never drawn an unsubsidized breath. The development costs for passenger aircraft and their avionics have been paid for, directly or indirectly, as a national-defense gimmick for a century, and we will not even venture a guess as to what it would have cost the industry (even if it had had the money) to build the airports. Given these actualities, when an outfit like Delta goes down, it’s less of a private-sector bankruptcy than another government-program cock-up. To treat the industry as a group of private-sector enterprises is to feed another of the delusions as to who and what we are that infect the national public life.

The only time the airline industry had a degree of stability and profitability was during the years it was run by the Civil Aeronautics Board, the government agency that set ticket prices and assigned routes to airlines. The C.A.B. was stodgy—it failed to run the industry so that people of moderate means could afford to fly, and it generally lacked imagination, flexibility and even a hint of daring—so it was pulled down in the late 1970’s by people screaming that the free market could do it better.

In some ways, they were right: The market did do it better than the C.A.B., but you can’t really, really, really have a free market in an industry dependent on the government. And so, in the end, unrestricted free-marketism will kill the industry for lack of investors, chaos, customer cruelty and skies dyed crimson from the red ink.

If proof be needed as to how hard it is to regulate an industry successfully, the C.A.B. provides it. Can it be done well? What lessons are to be learned from the C.A.B.? Once learned, are they applicable to creating some new kind of entity? The mere possibility of discussing such a thing will send that group of growling stand-patters in joints like the American Enterprise Institution clawing at the walls, but enabling these airlines, at great public expense, to drag themselves out of bankruptcy only to fail again is idiocy. Worse than idiocy, it offers the traveling public the promise of more uncomfortable, more unpleasant trips for as far as the eye can see or the jet can fly.

Instead of a C.A.B., what’s needed is the creation of a public body to oversee, in a general way, all forms of public transportation, air, rail and bus. This isn’t the destruction of private-sector, free-market companies, because none of these private-sector operations would last to the end of the month if their government subventions were withdrawn. In putting a new public body over all of them, the government would be running what it’s already paying for. There is no private sector here.

Can a new agency (or agencies) with the power to plan, integrate and regulate transportation succeed? Its two predecessors, the Interstate Commerce Commission and the C.A.B., fell miles short of unqualified success. Do we have the skills to do it right, and do we have the politics to allow it? Is three the charm, or just another, larger mess-up? And is the risk of a new kind of mess worse than being in and out of bankruptcy, Groundhog Day forever?

Nicholas von Hoffman is the author of A Devil’s Dictionary of Business, just published by Nation Books.

“The only other major industry that has more bankruptcies, on a percentage basis, is the restaurant business,” said Richard Gritta, a professor of finance at the University of Portland in Oregon whom The New York Times uses as an expert. In the last 25 years or so, the professor added, two-thirds of the industry has landed in bankruptcy at least once, and three—Pan Am, Eastern and Braniff—never made it out alive.

From the standpoint of airline investors, according to a remark attributed to Warren Buffett, it would have been a far, far better thing if the Wright brothers had crashed and burned at Kitty Hawk. Since the industry was freed of government supervision in 1978, it has had brilliant executives, stupid executives, madmen executives, ingenious executives, incompetent executives, charismatic executives, but never a profitable one. Oh, there have been brief periods when an airline here or there has made money, but sooner or later they all go kerplop.

When they do, the stockholders will be wiped out and the employees will take terrible hits in salary and benefits, even as the taxpayers will be obliged to put up huge sums to make the whole thing work—or kinda-sorta work—again. The only people who profit from these airline business catastrophes are the lawyers, accountants and Wall Street investment-banking houses who will pick up hundreds of millions ( literally hundreds of millions) in fees and charges before this latest airline spasm has run its course. Seldom will so few have made so much for doing so little.

This disaster is not unprecedented. A hundred years ago, the railroad industry was in exactly the same shape. More than half of its trackage was in bankruptcy—and for some of the same reasons that have made a ruin of the airline companies. Both industries had to deal with huge up-front starting costs. Both industries faced large operating costs and fickle, unpredictable and highly variable patronage.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, railroad companies besieged by angry customers—mostly farmers furious at the rates they had to pay to move their products to market—reacted by forming cartels to fix freight tariffs, but the cartel members would continually double-cross each other, so that approach didn’t work. Another attempt came with the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission, which had the power to fix rates and other terms of doing business, but the commission became a battleground between the railroad and the shipping interests, with the result that political pressures made it impossible to govern the industry for its long-term health. As a last resort, railroad companies had recourse to buying each other out to create enough of a monopoly to be able to dictate prices. This approach failed when even the giants of the era, like J.P. Morgan, ran out of money trying to pull it off. It didn’t help that Morgan had no background in transportation and thus didn’t have a clue what the hell he was doing. The monopoly route was also stymied by giant shippers like Andrew Carnegie, who put the railroads on notice that if they tried to hold him up with what he thought were extortionate rates, he’d build his own goddamn railroad.

The airline mess has also been compounded by much malarkey filling the air about “private sector” this and “free market” that. Right-wing egestions hold that until the coming of closet collectivism, government stayed out of the private sector, an area of life unsullied by any form of public subsidy or subvention. Left-wing disgorgements hold that any kind of public help is corporate welfare. All of this flies in the face of the history of business in the United States, where subsidies in transportation have been the rule, not the exception.

The Federal-era stagecoach network was subsidized through the Post Office, as the airline companies would be two centuries later. Stagecoaches were useless for hauling freight, especially bulk shipments of grain from the rapidly developing Midwest. It would have been convenient if the rivers had run from west to east to facilitate transshipment to the markets of Europe, but since geography wouldn’t cooperate, Americans dug canals, mostly paid for by state and local governments. The most famous and most wildly successful was the Erie Canal, and from Albany to Buffalo, nary a complaint about socialism was to be heard.

The railroad gradually superseded the canals as the primary method of shipping. They too were the beneficiaries of a variety of federal, state and local subsidies. Next came the automobile and the truck, whose subsidies in the form of roads, bridges and tunnels are so much a part of the landscape that we seldom think of them as subsidies, but as the natural, God-given responsibility of government. It wasn’t so in 1914, when the Wilson administration put the federal government in the road-building business for the first time since Andrew Jackson’s era, when such activities were pronounced unconstitutional. Only now, when the costs of road building and maintenance has gotten to the point that some states are granting toll-road monopolies to private firms, has it occurred to us that this form of transportation is highly subsidized, even with the dedicated gas tax.

The airline industry has never drawn an unsubsidized breath. The development costs for passenger aircraft and their avionics have been paid for, directly or indirectly, as a national-defense gimmick for a century, and we will not even venture a guess as to what it would have cost the industry (even if it had had the money) to build the airports. Given these actualities, when an outfit like Delta goes down, it’s less of a private-sector bankruptcy than another government-program cock-up. To treat the industry as a group of private-sector enterprises is to feed another of the delusions as to who and what we are that infect the national public life.

The only time the airline industry had a degree of stability and profitability was during the years it was run by the Civil Aeronautics Board, the government agency that set ticket prices and assigned routes to airlines. The C.A.B. was stodgy—it failed to run the industry so that people of moderate means could afford to fly, and it generally lacked imagination, flexibility and even a hint of daring—so it was pulled down in the late 1970’s by people screaming that the free market could do it better.

In some ways, they were right: The market did do it better than the C.A.B., but you can’t really, really, really have a free market in an industry dependent on the government. And so, in the end, unrestricted free-marketism will kill the industry for lack of investors, chaos, customer cruelty and skies dyed crimson from the red ink.

If proof be needed as to how hard it is to regulate an industry successfully, the C.A.B. provides it. Can it be done well? What lessons are to be learned from the C.A.B.? Once learned, are they applicable to creating some new kind of entity? The mere possibility of discussing such a thing will send that group of growling stand-patters in joints like the American Enterprise Institution clawing at the walls, but enabling these airlines, at great public expense, to drag themselves out of bankruptcy only to fail again is idiocy. Worse than idiocy, it offers the traveling public the promise of more uncomfortable, more unpleasant trips for as far as the eye can see or the jet can fly.

Instead of a C.A.B., what’s needed is the creation of a public body to oversee, in a general way, all forms of public transportation, air, rail and bus. This isn’t the destruction of private-sector, free-market companies, because none of these private-sector operations would last to the end of the month if their government subventions were withdrawn. In putting a new public body over all of them, the government would be running what it’s already paying for. There is no private sector here.

Can a new agency (or agencies) with the power to plan, integrate and regulate transportation succeed? Its two predecessors, the Interstate Commerce Commission and the C.A.B., fell miles short of unqualified success. Do we have the skills to do it right, and do we have the politics to allow it? Is three the charm, or just another, larger mess-up? And is the risk of a new kind of mess worse than being in and out of bankruptcy, Groundhog Day forever?

Nicholas von Hoffman is the author of A Devil’s Dictionary of Business, just published by Nation Books.

The Harrison looks like a clubby Upper East Side American bistro transplanted to the dusky fringe of Tribeca: dark wood, a burnished walnut bar, cream-colored wainscoting, hammered-tin lanterns and candles galore. Even the conservatively attired patrons appear to come from uptown ZIP codes.

Three and a half years old, the Harrison is the second collaboration of Danny Abrams and Jimmy Bradley, whose stable also includes the Red Cat, the Mermaid Inn and, most recently, Pace, on nearby Hudson Street. The food at the Harrison has always been good; however, it reached a peak last fall when the restaurant brought on board 36-year-old Brian Bistrong, whose résumé includes two years at Les-pinasse, seven years at Bouley, and the former Citarella (now called Josephs). Befitting this unaffected setting, his contemporary American cooking is inventive yet accessible, and with a clarity of flavors that never leaves the diner bewildered.

Virtually everything on the menu looks appealing. I rarely order quail as an appetizer, because it requires a lot of drilling for a thin vein of gold. Having seen one served to an adjacent table, however, I decided to give it a try. Partially deboned and splayed on the plate for easy cutting, it was roasted to golden crispness and boosted by a tamarind-tinged carrot "stew" flavored with cashew butter.

An example of the chef's winning restraint is a homemade ricotta cavatelli-the cheese is part of the dough-swathed in a vibrant mélange of bitter greens and a touch of tomato, and holding succulent shards of rabbit. A foamy horse-radish sauce did wonders for a duo of bulky sea scallops, paired with a warm potato salad.

Even the ubiquitous fried calamari gets an uplifting treatment. Perfectly fried, the little pinkie rings are arranged over an invigorating combination of chopped parsley, chives, piquillo peppers and salty serrano ham. One of the more winsome dishes (and not among my favorites) is a play on biscuits and gravy, in which scallion-laced Southern biscuits are ringed by three types of clams-razor, Manila and Wellfleets-all adrift on a clam-juice velouté that was somewhat overshadowed by salty slivers of chorizo.

While the dining room can be crowded and cacophonous, the servers, donning preppy blue-checked shirts and ties, are sharp and professional, even when it comes to wine.

The international wine selection is organized by characteristics-light, medium-bodied and full-and quality bottles abound in all price ranges. Two exceptional inexpensive choices are the white 2003 AZ pinot gris, from the Willamette Valley in Oregon ($29); and, in red, the 2000 Meix Foulot Mercurey, 1er Cru, Cote Chalonnaise ($27).

Seafood is the strong card among main courses. A thick plank of pan-roasted fluke is enlivened with a zesty mustard sabayon and a bittersweet reduction of browned onions, vermouth and chicken stock. If you aren't among the legions of anchovy-phobes, a subtle and mildly salty white anchovy sauce brings to life a beautiful fillet of grilled striped bass. Another uncommon combination-cod and braised red cabbage-sounded improbable, and while it was less combative than I had expected, the dish would have been fine with only its warm hazelnut dressing, toasted hazelnuts and crosnes (similar to Jerusalem artichokes).

Calf's liver aficionados would be delighted with this rendition, served with a sweet sherry reduction and a terrific bacon and onion torta. An excellent quality free-range chicken, firm and meaty, is perfectly roasted and served in a faintly sharp paprika sauce, Brussels sprouts and chestnut stuffing. Vegetables are à la carte, and I can recommend the heady leek and mushroom risotto and herbed spaetzle.

Pastry chef Jeff Gerace turns out a patriotic assembly of fine desserts like banana cream pie, apple and cranberry crisp, and devil's food cake. Also outstanding was the meyer lemon meringue pie with an intriguing lemon-thyme sabayon and candied kumquats. And if the chocolate mousse layered devil's food cake weren't swoony enough, the superb coffee ice cream, velvety and rich, packs enough caffeine to energize a fleet of cabbies.

To West Side Granddaddy

A casually dressed, middle-aged couple (she in a bulky sweater, he in an open-necked shirt and jacket) rose from their table after an early dinner. The waiter, who was not some young moonlighting actor wearing a T-shirt but an old-time professional in black tie, gently pulled back their chairs. The woman turned around and gave him a hug. "Next time we'll bring Oliver," she said and then threw her hands up in the air. "He's this tall! Last time you saw him, remember, he was in here," she said, patting her stomach.

My companion sighed and looked over at the mural behind them, where Howard Chandler Christy's famous naked wood nymphs were cavorting happily in the grass under apple blossoms, just as they've done for over 60 years. "Those girls never grow any older," he said.

Nor, it seems, does Café des Artistes, which opened in 1917, during the First World War, on the ground floor of the landmark studio building on West 67th Street near Central Park. Time has not always been kind to the city's historic restaurants, regardless of the long list of celebrities who frequented them (and whose signed photographs often hang on the walls). You can only pity those poor tourists, hoping the sight of someone famous might redeem a bad, expensive meal served by a rude waiter.

Café des Artistes, on the other hand, has not only kept its luster (and its roster), it has another thing going for it. It feels very much of the neighborhood. I've been coming here since 1975, when it was taken over by the indomitable George Lang, whose wife Jenifer is now the managing director. I always liked the fact that the customers-like the food-are such a mix. Mr. Lang, who also resurrected Gundel in his native Hungary a few years ago, fashioned Café des Artistes along the lines of a grand old Hungarian café or a restaurant like La Coupole. You can come in for a plate of oysters and a glass of wine or steak frites, or sit at the bar after a concert and share some excessive Hungarian/Viennese desserts.

A dessert buffet is set up in the middle of the mahogany-paneled front room, which is lined with a row of dark-green banquettes and lead-paned windows giving onto the street, the sills laden with flowering plants. Up a few steps is an inner dining room with booths, a three-sided mahogany bar hung with low lights and set with racks of hard-boiled eggs and bowls of nuts. Here there's a small portrait of the rakish-looking Christy, who had a studio in the building and apparently liked to sleep with his models every bit as much as drawing them. The lighting is soft (a bit pin-pointy over your eyes if you sit on the front room's banquette), and between the beautiful murals (there are six of them, including The Fountain of Youth ) are mirrors, which give a feeling of space. Across the vestibule from the main restaurant, in a former office, there's another bar called the Parlor that serves drinks, coffee and desserts and some dinner dishes from the main restaurant.

Three months ago, Thomas Ferlesch, an Austrian who was Café des Artistes' chef for the past 12 years, left to open his own restaurant, Thomas Beisl, opposite the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The new chef, Ari Nieminen, who is from Finland, previously cooked at the Firebird. The menu remains pretty much the same as it has been over the years, with the addition of seasonal dishes. And if you're tired of restaurants where you find yourself staring at the ingredients on your plate and trying to figure out what they are, or plowing your way through "comfort food" that is anything but comforting to the digestion, then this menu is for you.

The perennial classics include salmon five ways: hot and cold smoked, poached, gravlax and tartare. It makes a pleasant first course or even a main dish at lunch. The steak tartare is perfectly seasoned with plenty of spices and capers and comes with four relishes nestled in small endive leaves. You can also start with half a dozen briny oysters or a crisp endive salad with grapes, walnuts and crumbled Stilton. The fricassee of snails is wonderful: It comes with a dark, garlicky vidalia onion soubise, cooked cherry tomatoes that add hints of acidity and sweetness, and is topped with three baton-shaped garlic brioche croutons. The asparagus vinaigrette would be better if it weren't chilled from the refrigerator. (And isn't it a bit early for asparagus? Or have we forgotten there was once a season? I still find it strange eating it during the winter.)

One of the cleverest dishes on the menu is a schnitzel made with sturgeon. New Yorkers are accustomed to eating their sturgeon plain and smoked, usually on a Sunday morning. Here it comes fried in a thin coating of bread crumbs, served with cucumber vinaigrette, parsley potatoes and rémoulade. It's a terrific combination. The veal tonnato served at lunch is a disappointment. A mess to look at, it's flopped down on a bed of arugula and painted with squiggles of tuna and caper mayonnaise. To boot, it doesn't have much taste.

Dover sole, accompanied by fondant potato and asparagus, is brought up to date with a garnish of fried sliced lemon, which adds a nice, sharp contrast to the rich, brown butter sauce. Duck comes two ways: The pan-seared breast is tender and rare, the leg a velvety crisp confit. Kumquats, shiitake mushrooms and kasha work nicely with the dish, but for some reason asparagus has been added, and it doesn't go with the rest at all. But Café des Artistes does a great pot au feu, served with the traditional condiments in little dishes-coarse sea salt, cornichons, mustards, horseradish cream and toasts for the marrow, which you spoon out of the bones. The broth is excellent. "This is total soul food," exclaimed my friend, who was feeling pretty ecstatic anyway because we'd just been to a wonderful concert. The veal chop, however, is less successful, with carrots, cabbage and a smoky sauce that tastes burned.

The wine list is short and well chosen, with interesting low-priced bottles, such as the wonderfully named St. Innocent, Temperance Hill, a very good pinot noir from Oregon for $37.

Desserts are lavish and rich. They include perfect, creamy crème brûlée in three flavors-lavender, chocolate and regular-and an orange savarin, which is like a rich pound cake with apricots. I didn't find the hot fudge Napoleon (sprinkled with powdered sugar and served with berries) very exciting, although my companion finished the whole thing. The Ilona Torte, a rich concoction of chocolate and walnuts, was created by Mr. Lang. When he wrote the recipe for the dish 20 years ago, he included this note: "One slice of it will bring temporary happiness, which is more than we get from most things these days." Little did he know then how much we could all use a slice of that torte now.