Her husband, Jeffrey, an executive at hedge fund marauder Dan Loeb’s $9 billion Third Point LLC, had engaged in a pattern of criminal conspiracy, she alleged, committing mail and wire fraud to conceal more than $1 million in assets since he’d first hired a divorce lawyer in 2006. That was just the beginning. Mr. Perry’s entire career, his wife said, “has been marked by repeated criminal activity in his quest to amass his fortune.”

And that’s where the complaint took a tabloid turn. To support her claim, the plaintiff cited Mr. Perry’s status as a defendant in a 2006 lawsuit accusing the hedge funder of participating in a scheme to manipulate the stock of a Canadian company called Fairfax Financial. Ms. Bingham-Perry didn’t stop there. She also noted the involvement of three hedge fund managers—Mr. Loeb, James Chanos and Steven A. Cohen—who were co-defendants in the Fairfax case.

It hardly matters that all four men had been dismissed from the Fairfax lawsuit, or that Ms. Bingham-Perry’s complaint will stand or fall on her charge that Mr. Perry concealed assets. If a judge agrees to hear her case, the plaintiff’s legal team could potentially drag some of the heaviest hitters in the hedge fund world into the discovery process, forcing them to answer questions about events that took place nearly a decade ago.

Mr. Perry’s lawyer says the lawsuit is groundless, a crude play to influence settlement negotiations. But even if the complaint amounts to no more than a shakedown attempt, it’s unlikely to fade quietly.

Pay up, or have your dirty laundry aired in public—that’s the blueprint for most blackmail. But using federal racketeering law to threaten to expose hedge-fund managers’ most closely guarded secrets takes a certain amount of ingenuity. Even if the judge dismisses Ms. Bingham-Perry’s complaint, the suit has placed her among the vanguard of hedge fund wives seeking to establish civil RICO as a go-to weapon in high-finance divorce. And when marriages go south, affluent spouses tend to fling whatever piece of legal crockery is close at hand.

“The rich have more complicated splits because there are more assets to divide,” noted Jill Kargman, whose novel The Ex-Mrs. Hedge Fund chronicled the pre-financial crisis extravagance of Manhattan’s leading financial couples, imagining a world of $675,000 bowls of matzoh ball soup and orgies on private jets.

But it doesn’t take a novelist to imagine juicy tales of high-finance divorce—the real-life cases making headlines in recent years have been plenty salacious.

Last month, for instance, hedge fund manager Daniel Shak sued his ex-wife, the professional poker player Beth Shak, for failing to disclose certain assets during their divorce. To wit: a collection of 1,200 pairs of Christian Louboutins and other designer shoes that Ms. Shak herself values at a cool $1 million. (Mr. Shak withdrew the suit last week.)

In March, Highland Capital Management founder James Dondero argued that he was insolvent according to Texas family law, despite showing income of $36 million on his 2010 tax returns. According topress reports, Mr. Dondero, who through Highland manages $23 billion in assets, wanted to avoid making good on a prenuptial agreement that would have capped his wife’s settlement at a mere $5 million.

And then there was the case of self-proclaimed genius and private equity investor Henry Silverman, who attempted to introduce “scientific” evidence into his divorce proceedings to demonstrate that his $450 million fortune derived from his own innate qualities—and thus were not subject to equitable distribution as marital assets. (A bold effort, but shot down in court.)

“They’re more strategic in divorce because they have to be,” Karen McMahon, a Long Island-based divorce coach, said of her high-net-worth clients.

Such strategies seem to be proliferating of late. For instance, prenups are increasingly being written to include “escalator clauses”—by which a spouse is guaranteed a greater piece of the pie the longer a marriage lasts. Meanwhile, postnups have become de riguer in the hedge fund world. Some hedge funds actually require new partners to sign postnuptial agreements with their spouses as a condition for gaining ownership shares in the firm. The impetus is less about preventing a spouse from winning controlling shares—an outcome generally precluded by partnership agreements—than it is a question of keeping an aggressive lawyer or accountant from slapping an exaggerated valuation on the firm.

“The idea is to keep nosy spouses out of the books,” said Ken Burrows, a lawyer who has written such agreements. It’s hardly a far-fetched concern. Earlier this year, Twin Capital Management founder David Simon sued his wife Linda, alleging that she hacked into his laptop. She said she was looking for evidence of extra-marital affairs; he said she accessed highly confidential financial records.

There’s a certain poetic justice to using civil RICO in hedge fund divorces. The statute—the Racketeer Influenced Criminal Organizations Act—was passed by Congress in 1970 to help prosecutors go after Mafia kingpins who kept their noses clean of day-to-day criminal activity. Forty years later, we’re living in an era defined in part by frustration that the titans who profited in the run-up to the various financial crises have mostly avoided criminal prosecution, and it seems fitting that spouses are using RICO to hit hedgies where the government can’t.

By the mid-1980s, RICO began to find broader applications, and its use in divorce cases dates back at least to 1997. The legal standard is a continuous pattern of criminal activity. In the context of Ms. Bingham-Perry’s complaint, the allegation is that Mr. Perry conspired with a divorce attorney as early as 2006 to wire marital assets to offshore and other secret accounts, then committed mail fraud by using the U.S. Postal Service to file false net-worth statements as part of the divorce proceedings.

Whether the plaintiff’s counsel, Eric Su, who replaced Clifford James yesterday, can convince a judge that the Mr. Perry’s alleged actions support a civil RICO case is no sure thing, as judges are often disinclined towards civil RICO cases. The incentives to roll the dice, however, are significant: Plaintiffs are entitled to three times the damages, plus lawyer’s fees, in civil RICO suits.

“I sometimes like to challenge my students with the question, ‘Is it professional malpractice not to characterize a claim as civil RICO?’” Sara Sun Beale, a law professor at Duke University, told The Observer. “If nothing else, it moves the settlement needle closer to the plaintiffs.”

There’s another temptation, of course: for a spouse who has long played second fiddle to the unceasing demands of a high-profile career (and what financier’sspouse hasn’t?), the chance to drag an ex’s business partners into the courtroom, or at least the press, can seem irresistible—just comeuppance for a workaholic partner.

And in Mr. Perry’s case, the divorce proceedings have threatened to embarrass his colleagues. A little background: In 2006, Toronto-based Fairfax filed suit against an array of parties including Third Point, Mr. Loeb and Mr. Perry, as well as Mr. Cohen’s SAC Capital and Mr. Chanos’ Kynikos Associates—alleging that the hedge funders spread false rumors about Fairfax in an attempt to drive down the share price, and that those hedge funds profited by shorting Fairfax stock.

Most of the plaintiffs in the case had been dismissed by spring of this year on the grounds that they shouldn’t have to stand trial in New Jersey, where Fairfax filed its suit. Ms. Bingham-Perry’s complaint therefore threatens to exhume a matter these guys thought was dead and buried.

Ms. Bingham-Perry isn’t the first hedge fund wife to try to wrangle insider-trading allegations into her divorce settlement. Patient zero might well be Patricia Cohen, who brought a RICO action alleging that her longtime ex—the same Mr. Cohen referenced in Ms. Bingham-Perry’s complaint—hid $5.5 million during in the couple’s 1990 divorce. That charge might have made headlines on its own: by the time Ms. Cohen filed her complaint, her ex-husband had become one of the richest and most influential hedge fund managers in the world.

But like Ms. Bingham-Perry after her, Ms. Cohen gave the public something extra to ogle, peppering her complaint with allegations that Mr. Cohen had engaged in insider trading to accumulate the assets his ex-wife would later say he concealed. That fit with a piece of Wall Street gossip that’s been circulating in recent years: that the government lawyers who’ve led the ongoing crackdown on insider trading have long placed Mr. Cohen at the top of their list.

A judge dismissed the case last year, though that decision is under appeal. Ms. Cohen, meanwhile, has moved onto her third attorney, Chicago-based RICO specialist Howard Foster, who just happens to be listed as a supporting attorney on Ms. Bingham-Cohen’s complaint.

At least Ms. Cohen alleged that her husband’s fast and loose attitude toward securities law had something to do with the assets she says he concealed. Ms. Bingham-Perry’s complaint merely argues that the Fairfax scheme establishes “that Jeffrey has committed or conspired to commute a pattern of racketeering activity in the last decade.”

Once a crook, always a crook, in other words. Another theory, of course, is that Ms. Bingham-Perry is trying to drag the Fairfax case into her divorce to influence the settlement, which, not surprisingly, is the point of view Mr. Perry’s counsel is taking.

“It’s a completely frivolous lawsuit,” attorney Robert Stephen Cohen told The Observer, noting that the RICO action was filed just before a judge awarded Mr. Perry sole custody of the couple’s two children. “It was an attempt to intimidate him. As we speak, papers are being drafted to dismiss the case.”

Neither Mr. James nor Mr. Foster, the plaintiff’s attorneys, responded to email and telephone requests for comment. But at least one part of their client’s case that doesn’t appear to track: “You don’t have an injury until you have a final result,” Jeffrey Grell, a Minneapolis-based lawyer who has litigated civil RICO actions on behalf of plaintiffs and defendants, told The Observer. Which is to say that until a spouse shows damages derived from the concealment of assets, the racketeering law may not apply.

Even if Ms. Bingham-Perry’s case is found to be without merit, however, its effects might be far-reaching. Just as the Cohen matter spawned the Bingham-Perry complaint, more than one lawyer familiar with civil RICO actions predicted the latter case would give rise to a series of copycats.

That's a question Elizabeth Bingham-Perry could answer. The Scarsdale resident filed a civil RICO action against her husband Jeffrey Perry in the U.S. Southern District's Westchester courthouse last week.

Mr. Perry, it so happens, is an executive at Third Point LLC, the hedge fund founded by Dan Loeb.

In the complaint, Ms. Bingham-Perry alleges that Mr. Perry lied on net worth statements submitted by mail in the divorce proceedings, concealing assets in excess of $1 million in offshore and other acounts. That's just the start. Mr. Perry's entire career, his wife alleges, "has been marked by repeated criminal activity in his quest to amass his fortune,” a claim she rests on Mr. Perry's alleged participation in a scheme to drive down the share price of a Canadian company called Fairfax Financial.

Which is a pretty nasty thing to say about your husband of 23 years, and a crude but potentially useful cudgel for hammering out a settlement.

A little background: RICO is the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act, passed by Congress in 1970 to allow the government to prosecute mafia godfathers for crimes committed by their organizations, but written broadly enough to apply to any person who uses an enterprise to engage in a continuous pattern of criminal activity.

"You see it a lot in divorce cases," said Jeffrey Grell, a lawyer at Grell & Feist who teaches a course on civil RICO at the University of Minnesota School of Law and has represented plaintiffs and defendants in civil racketeering charges. "Particularly when there have been efforts by one spouse to fraudulently conceal assets from the other."

Indeed, Ms. Bingham-Perry isn't the first hedge fund wife to play this hand.

In 2009, Patricia Cohen brought a civil RICO suit against SAC Capital founder and longtime ex Steven A. Cohen. A judge dismissed the case in March 2011, though it's currently under appeal.

Coincidentally, attorney Howard W. Foster, who's listed on Ms. Bingham-Perry's complaint as a pro hac vice counsel, also represented Ms. Cohen.

The first half of Ms. Bingham-Perry's complaint is fairly straightforward. She says that Mr. Perry used "U.S. mails and wires to perpetuate frauds and enrich himself in the divorce actions," wiring assets into secret accounts after hiring a divorce lawyer in 2005, then intentionally omitting those assets in documents mailed to Ms. Bingham-Perry and the New York State Supreme Court last year.

Whether the plaintiff's counsel—Clifford James, who once sued the Andy Warhol Foundation on behalf of the Velvet Underground—can convince a judge that the Mr. Perry's alleged actions support a civil RICO case is no sure thing, but there are clear incentives to filing claims like this one: Plaintiffs are entitled to three times the damages, plus lawyer's fees, in civil RICO suits.

“I sometimes like to challenge my students with the question, 'Is it professional malpractice not to characterize a claim as civil RICO?'” Sara Sun Beale, a law professor at Duke University, told The Observer, referring to the outsized damages available. "If nothing else, it moves the settlement needle closer to the plaintiffs."

And yet, it's the second half of her complaint that Ms. Bingham-Perry complaint that made us take note. In addition to Mr. Perry's alleged concealment of marital assets, she says, her hedge funder soon-to-be ex-husband participated in a conspiracy to drive down the share price of Fairfax Financial.

The short story: In 2006, Toronto-based Fairfax filed suit against an array of parties including Third Point, Mr. Loeb and Mr. Perry, alleging that a group of hedge funds—including Mr. Cohen's SAC Capital and James Chanos' Kynikos Associates—spread false rumors about Fairfax in an attempt to drive down the share price, and that those hedge funds profited by shorting Fairfax stock. (Mr. Perry, as well as Mr. Loeb, Mr. Cohen, Mr. Chanos and their respective firms, have all been dismissed from the Fairfax case.)

Ms. Bingham-Perry's suit alleges: "Jeffrey conspired to commit many instances of disseminating false information about Fairfax in order to harm it and enrich himself from 2003-2006."

Now, dear reader, is when you might wonder what in the hell this has to do with divorce.

While that allegation doesn't relate directly to the plaintiff's claim that her husband concealed assets, the complaint argues that the Fairfax scheme establishes "that Jeffrey has committed or conspired to commute a pattern of racketeering activity in the last decade."

Bankster is as bankster does, the argument might go, and what's hiding marital assets offshore to someone who's conspired to bring down an entire company?

At any rate, that's one way to read the complaint, and at face value, not an implausible one. Wall Streeters have been concealing assets from their spouses as long as there's been a such thing as divorce. Another theory, of course, is that Ms. Bingham-Perry is trying to drag the Fairfax case into her divorce to influence the settlement.

Which, not surprisingly, is the point of view Mr. Perry's counsel is taking.

"It's a completely frivolous lawsuit," said attorney Robert Stephen Cohen, noting that the RICO action was filed just before a judge awarded Mr. Perry sole custody of the couple's two minor children. "It was an attempt to intimidate him. As we speak, papers are being drafted to dismiss the case."

Neither Mr. James nor Mr. Foster, the plaintiff's attorneys, responded to email and telephone requests for comment. But there's at least one part of their client's case that doesn't appear to track: "You don’t have a claim until you have a final result," Mr. Grell told The Observer, which is to say that until a spouse shows damages derived from the concealment of assets, the racketeering law may not apply. But the financial part of the Perrys divorce won't be contested for several months. "To have a RICO complaint, you almost have to have a crappy divorce result."

The suit, made public yesterday, is Ms. Cohen's third attempt in the last year to sue Mr. Cohen — from whom she separated in 1988. With a new lawyer, who replaced Gaytri Kachroo, who followed Paul Batista, she wants $2.75 million, down from her $300 million number last December. And she's no longer demanding, as she was in April, a "substantial, if not controlling" stake in Mr. Cohen's hedge fund SAC Capital. Plus, the list of enemies has been pared down, to three: Mr. Cohen, his brother Donald, and his former lawyer Brett Lurie, who's apparently done jail time for fraud.

Luckily, the streamlined suit still comes with pointed fingers and name-calling. Ms. Cohen expands allegations about insider trading: Her ex-husband, the new suit says, learned from trader Bruce Newberg, a pal from Wharton business school, that General Electric would buy RCA. It was information that led Mr. Cohen to buy RCA stock and, she says, make an easy $10 million. Dennis Levine, Mr. Newberg's "superior" at Drexel Burnham Lambert, was allegedly in on the scheme.

According to Ms. Cohen, Mr. Newberg and Mr. Cohen called themselves "the Wharton mafia," and just wanted to "take care of one another."

The $2.75 million in damages is half of the $5.5 million that Ms. Cohen says her ex-husband earned in 1987 — without telling her — while "anticipating he and Patricia would soon get a divorce." The earnings allegedly came after Mr. Cohen told his then-wife that he had lost $9 million in a real estate investment, appearing convincingly "distraught."

According to court documents, Ms. Cohen's first lawyer "beat a hasty retreat" in December after Mr. Cohen's lawyer sent him a threatening letter. The second lawyer's work, she says, was "sprawling and confusing." This time around, some people think that Mr. Cohen — who is worth more than $6 billion and is living comfortably in Greenwich, Conn., with his new wife and their five kids — should just settle.

In the last seven days, the deluge of new Wall Street scandals has been constant, fascinating and incredibly confusing. Helpfully, one tie that binds is that nearly every major accusation has been accompanied by denials from the accused, but beyond that things can get confusing. What's the difference between the mortgage deal named Aquarius and the one called Abacus? Did Moody's and other credit rating agencies fool the public, or were they fooled? Was Lehman the only bank that used a book-cooker like Repo 105? What, again, was Chooch? Here is a brief and alphabetized guide to recent scandals.

Abacus: Abacus 2007-AC was one of the dozens of deals that Goldman is said to have built so that the bank and certain clients, in this case John Paulson, could bet heavily against the soon-to-tank housing market. Without it, we wouldn't have had fabulous Fabrice, an S.E.C. case and a lot of Senatorial fun.

Chooch: This charming film about ne’er-do-wells from Queens who have a fun-filled adventure in Mexico was in the news again this April, when the giant private-equity firm Quadrangle settled pay-to-play charges, and denounced co-founder Steve Rattner. Why? The low-budget 2003 comedy was produced by the New York state pension fund chief investment officer’s brother. Back when Mr. Rattner was still running Quadrangle, the billionaire was said to have gotten in touch with an entertainment company controlled by his firm to arrange for Chooch to be distributed. Afterwards, the state pension fund invested $100 million with Quadrangle. "Mr. Rattner does not agree," a spokesperson said after the denouncement, "with the characterization of events released today."

Cohen vs. Cohen: Steven A. Cohen is one of the most powerful hedge fund managers in the world; Patricia Cohen is the women he divorced more than 20 years ago. Late last year, she filed a lawsuit under the racketeer act asking for $300 million, accusing him of fraud and insider trading. She was sued in April by her own lawyer.

Dead Presidents: Morgan Stanley was said this week to have misled its investors about mortgage deals known around the firm as "Dead Presidents," because they were named after the likes of James "doughface" Buchanan and Andrew Jackson. The deals reportedly had built-in features that "made it more likely" for investors to lose money when mortgage bonds were souring. 

The Dow Crash: Why did the Dow have the biggest intraday fall in its history on May 6? No one seems to know, although they do like gossiping about fat fingers and Citi screw-ups.

Galleon: It was already astounding news when the billionaire hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam was arrested in October, accused of running the biggest insider trading scheme in the industry’s history. By the end of the year, the investigation of his firm, Galleon, had only gotten bigger, and in April it sucked in Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta, who soon stepped down. He declined to seek board reelection because of other commitments, he said at the time.

Magnetar: Just before ProPublica won a Pulitzer Prize this year, it released a 5,900-word exposé on this cosmically named hedge fund. Magnetar created and bet against mortgage deals that wiped out about $40 billion when they eventually became worthless: ACA Aquarius, Vertical Virgo, Sagittarius and Draco are some of their fun names. The article explained how the firm helped perpetuate the subprime mortgage market by creating investments to bet against.

Mistaken Moody’s: There was news this week that Andrew Cuomo is looking into whether Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Citi, Merrill Lynch and four other banks misled credit rating agencies. So were Moody's, Fitch and S&P simply duped into giving banks' deals inflated ratings? Not quite. For one, those agencies posted their models so that bankers could "reverse engineer" to get desired ratings, a source told the Times. Meanwhile, Moody's was already in a heap of trouble, thanks to a notice from the S.E.C. As for S&P: "Did the company make mistakes? I’ve never used the word 'mistake,'" a spokesperson said recently.

New Madoffs: There is only one Bernie, but Ponzi schemers continue to make news. Minnesota’s Tom Petters was recently sentenced to 50 years in prison for his $3.65 billion plot (the second-largest in American history); Scott Rothstein pleaded guilty to his $1.2 billion scheme; and Miami’s Nevin Shaprio was charged soon after.

The Orca: After the horribly violent death of SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau in February, activists criticized the private-equity giant Blackstone, who had bought SeaWorld and other theme parks for $2.3 billion. The firm, however, was contrite. There's a metaphor about private equity in here, somewhere.

Repo 105: The Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy examiner's report broke news of Repo 105, a spectacular accounting trick the investment bank used to fluff up the look of its balance sheet as it hurtled toward death in September 2008. "When I read this, I giggle a little bit," a former executive said at the time. Have other banks used 105-style tricks? Bank of America may have—and about 17 others. "Efforts to manage the size of our balance sheet are routine and appropriate," a Bank of America spokesperson said in March, and again in April.

The Rubin Cuddle: "And not long afterward the former Treasury Secretary had his tongue down my throat and hands everywhere, sort of like an octopus."

Mr. Siegel is not alone in feeling vindicated by the section's imminent demise. Since its launch in 1997, the section has become a favorite punching bag for intellectual journalists of all stripes, with Mr. Siegel shouting where others have only dared to whisper. (In a New Republic article in 1998, he famously called Arts & Ideas "a weekly banana peel dropped in the path of human intelligence.") "The problem with the section was the nature of the section," Mr. Siegel said. "You just can't isolate 'ideas' from the rest of culture, of life."

For his part, Steven Erlanger, the paper's culture editor, said The Times was committed to doing "more ideas reporting, not less"-just not in its own designated section. Meanwhile, Patricia Cohen, the section's founding and current editor, seemed peculiarly agnostic about the demise of her realm. "I created the section, so obviously I think it was a good idea to put these stories together," Ms. Cohen said. "Having said that, there are many ways to effectively cover any subject, and the paper is still committed to covering those stories."

Indeed, one could say that Ms. Cohen's non-response points to the most frequently heard criticism of the section: Its on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand approach makes for toothless coverage of ideas that already don't necessarily lend themselves to newspaper word-lengths or style. As one intellectual journalist and Times -watcher summed up the problem: "They don't use semi-colons."

"I never felt it had a very strong identity," Jay Rosen, a press critic and professor at the New York University School of Journalism, said of the section. "I could never figure out what the idea was, although it seemed to me that [columnist] Ed Rothstein, who I respect as a journalist and a writer, was kind of the voice of the thing."

But Mr. Rosen wasn't prepared to dance on the section's grave just yet. "I don't think they should have killed it; they should have improved it," he said. "Instead of 'The section failed,' why not say 'We failed the section,' which would mean 'This was a good idea'-and it still is-'but we couldn't deploy ourselves the right way.' If you start a religion section and then decide it's boring, did religion fail? The subject has the responsibility to make itself vivid and alive?" he said.

The problem may be that the section seemed blithely uninterested in wooing the kind of readers who seemed most likely to want to devour it every week. A former editor at the Washington Post Style section, Ms. Cohen said she aimed the section at "the general reader."

"You don't need to have a Ph.D. to understand these articles," Ms. Cohen said. "I think basically the reason Joe Lelyveld chose to hire someone like myself with a newspaper background as opposed to someone in the academic world, or perhaps from Lingua Franca -I know he'd talked to people there before he talked to me-was exactly that reason. It's a difficult line to walk between the experts-the intellectuals who know their subject in incredible depth-and the general reader."

Ms. Cohen said she chose not to "replicate" the opinions offered on the Op-Ed page and in the Week in Review. "I think covering ideas as news is actually refreshing," she said. "From the beginning, I didn't want to approach the stories with an agenda. The point was not to publish my idea or your idea about a subject, but to cover the intellectual world with the same sophistication and detail that the paper covers other subjects."

Yet some say this approach was the section's fatal flaw. "The only idea given sovereignty at a newspaper is, 'We cover all sides; we take the view from nowhere.' And that's fatal to ideas journalism," said Mr. Rosen. "The best ideas journalism has always been, and is now, in places with an editorial perspective."

The section's news formula was easy to parody. Here's Mr. Siegel's riff: "Professor A thinks that all urban Americans more than 20 pounds overweight should be exterminated in order to increase leg room on buses and subways. Professor B thinks this violated the civil rights of overweight people. Of course, this is an old argument, one that goes back to the first century, when the Romans would routinely shorten their slaves in order to have a clearer view of the street during rush hours. Professor C thinks that this argument will continue 'for as long as people share the public space with other people.'"

Another risk of covering ideas as news is the tendency to create forced trends. "The bad thing is, the section looked at the world of ideas the way newspapers almost always do: Either you write about scandal, or you write about big trends," said Robert Boynton, who directs the graduate magazine-journalism program at N.Y.U.'s journalism school. Or, as Mr. Siegel put it, "If Professor Hoffenstoffen at the University of Okefenokee wrote a revisionist history of the washing machine, then this meant that American intellectuals were now turning to the formal study of major appliances."

Yet even as a news section, the section wasn't exactly breaking news. "I don't feel like it set the pace for coverage of ideas," said Scott McLemee, a senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education . "Obviously I still looked at it every week, and I still kicked myself now and then, but I almost never had a sense they were going to scoop me."

Times have changed. The Arts & Ideas section was conceived during the waning years of the culture wars, when intellectual debates often fell along more ideological lines. Steve Wasserman, the editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review , who said he spoke to The Times early on about joining the section but took himself out of the running for its editorship in 1996, said the original idea for Arts & Ideas was to track the "epiphenomena" in the culture that produced, say, a photographer like Robert Mapplethorpe-before the story became a legislative one about curtailing funding to the National Endowment for the Arts for sponsoring erotic work like Mapplethorpe's.

" The Times became seized with the notion that ideas have consequences. The idea was to report the ideas even before the consequences are made palpable in a political sense; it seemed to me enlightened," Mr. Wasserman said. Whether the section lived up to its promise is another question entirely. "I think it did fitfully do so, but it increasingly seemed rudderless," he added. "Early on in the first year and a half of its life, I knew a fair number of writers who turned to it with enthusiasm. After that, it was ever less relevant."

Scott McLemee agreed that there was a strong whiff of the passé in The Times ' approach to the world of ideas. "There was a period of time 10 years ago that what was happening in the humanities lent itself to the culture-war framework-an entrenched position versus avant-garde or postmodern," he said. "Those kind of fights were winding down, but were still pretty strong. I don't know when the entropy began to kick in, but it sure did. And it became more artificial to frame things in the same way."

Alexander Stille, an ideas journalist who has been on contract with Arts & Ideas, said newspaper coverage of culture is more important than ever. "After the end of the Cold War, I think cultural stories gained dramatically in importance. Instead of there being a kind of conflict in the world between ideologies and military alliances, the main problems in the globalized world were fundamentally cultural," said Mr. Stille, who teaches at Columbia University's School of Journalism and took time off from writing for The Times earlier this year to write a book. "Sept. 11 is ultimately about a clash of cultures," Mr. Stille said.

Mr. Stille called it a "strategic mistake" to dissolve the section. "I think there's a big danger, if you get rid of it as a special section and simply disperse [ideas stories] throughout the paper during the course of the week in the regular news sections, that the effect of those stories is simply diluted," he said. "If they can figure out a better, more imaginative way of doing something like this, that's great. The answer is not to get rid of it."

What about bringing in a new editor? Some people familiar with the section said The Times had tried to replace Ms. Cohen before. Ms. Cohen was offered a job on the national desk in 2000, but she insisted on keeping her place at Arts & Ideas. (Ms. Cohen said she wanted a more flexible schedule and "it's fun to run your own shop." ) The rest of the section's staff, including Mr. Rothstein and two reporters, Emily Eakin and Felicia Lee, is now in limbo, waiting to see where The Times will send them.

For his part, Sam Tanenhaus, the new editor of the Book Review -who before taking his new post was a distinguished ideas journalist himself-said the dissolution of Arts & Ideas was "news to me." But he offered a ray of hope to those who think the paper of record should be a more forceful presence in the world of ideas. At the Book Review , he said, "we certainly intend to do features of various kinds in addition to reviewing books. Some will be book-related ideas pieces. Absolutely."